


Dandelion Wine

by GoWithTheFlo20



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe, Always a Female Harry Potter - Freeform, BAMF Narcissa Black Malfoy, Dark Magic, Darker Sirius Black, F/M, Family Feels, Family Fluff, Female Harry Potter, Good Malfoys, Good Tom Riddle, Harry Potter is a Malfoy, He Would Still Stomp A Bitch For Disrespect, Malfoy Family-centric (Harry Potter), Malfoy Manor, Manipulative Albus Dumbledore, Mentor Severus Snape, Mistaken Identity, Morally Grey Harry Potter, Nothing Romantic Happens Until Harry Is Of Age, Or As Good As Tom Riddle Can Be, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Pureblood Culture (Harry Potter), Pureblood Politics (Harry Potter), Pureblood Society (Harry Potter), Slow Build, Slow Burn, Slytherin Harry Potter
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-21
Updated: 2020-09-25
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:28:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 34,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23771608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoWithTheFlo20/pseuds/GoWithTheFlo20
Summary: Harriet Potter was twelve years old when she uncovered the child's skull buried in her Aunt Petunia's garden in a sick twist of fate. It was safe to say her life hadn't been the same since when, upon closer inspection, Severus Snape discovered the skull belonged to Harriet Potter, who had died at age two.Plots, purebloods, and prophecies abound in a world where, on a stroke of luck, a Potter isn't there to fight the good fight.Only a misplaced Malfoy who, really, never suited red and gold as much as she did silver and green.
Relationships: Astoria Greengrass/Draco Malfoy, Bellatrix Black Lestrange/Rodolphus Lestrange, James Potter/Lily Evans Potter, Lucius Malfoy/Narcissa Black Malfoy, Petunia Evans Dursley/Vernon Dursley, Rabastan Lestrange/Harry Potter
Comments: 253
Kudos: 2402





	1. A Slip, A Skid, And A Sharp Shuck

Harriet Potter’s fate shifted with the echo of a clink.

It was a typical Saturday in the Dursley household, during the sweltering month of August that saw a heatwave searing the tarmac roads of Little Whinging. The perfect time to plant pink Primula blooms. Or, in Petunia Dursley’s case, the perfect time of year to let her niece out of her cupboard, herd her into the back garden, dump a trowel and a tray of sprouts into her young hands, and demand the task be done by noon. 

Harriet didn’t mind.

She adored gardening. The crisp scent of spun soil. The errant buzz of an inquisitive bumblebee. The feel of plump leaves brushing the tender skin on the inside of her wrist. Yes, there were, she decided at only twelve, worse ways to spend a Saturday. Worse ways she _had_ spent her Saturdays before. At least she saw daylight that morning, managed to get a lungful of air that wasn’t tainted with damp and mould, far away from the oil of the frying pan that sputtered and popped and burned her arms, and felt the glorious rays of sunlight warm her fragile bones.

The trowel made a scoffing sound as it upturned the dirt. A slip, a skid, and a sharp shuck.

If she was quiet, so very quiet, Petunia might forget she was out there.

Petunia may just forget Harriet existed at all.

Wouldn't that be nice?

Perhaps she could live out here, between the violets and pansies.

Drink rainwater and use the old oak by the shed for shade and bed.

Hyacinths couldn’t yell at you.

Daisy’s couldn’t pinch your arms if you accidentally mixed the colours in the laundry and turned Vernon’s shirt pink. 

Yarrow couldn’t hit you up the head if you burnt the morning toast.

And Pineapple Lilies couldn’t shove you back into your cupboard when you unwittingly planted the Primula blooms in the small patch of land by the fence, rather than underneath the window as Aunt Petunia had told Harriet to do that day.

_Shuck. Shuck. Shuck._

It was too late now, at any rate. Harriet had already planted seven of the sprouts by the time she realised her mistake. Moreover, the Primula blooms would do better with direct sunlight, or so she read on the peeling label of the plastic flower pots. Petunia’s rather adamant insisting that nothing be planted by that fence was nonsense. 

Utter nonsense.

Why plant the Primula anywhere else when they would only wither and wilt?

_Why keep a niece you loathed the very sight of?_

Adults were confusing creatures to Harriet. Almost a breed of their own, none more so than her Aunt and Uncle. They smiled often, but then scowled when their backs turned. They got enraged over the oddest of things. Worst of all, they always said one thing and meant another entirely. A trap Harriet had fallen into one too many times for comfort. It was surprising they got anything done.

_Shuck. Shuck. Shuck-_

_Clink._

Harriet hesitated, frowning, patting the soil of her little hole with the rusted trowel.

_Clink. Clink. Clink._

Another buried stone. Harriet had come across three earlier. Terrible things. They mangled the roots systems of the more delicate plants. Tilting over, she set to work, brushing the top layer of silt from the head of the rock so she could dig around the sides and, if it wasn’t too heavy, pluck the stone out.

When the top came into view, Harriet paused. Strange, she thought, how white the stone was.

Indeed, perhaps it was no stone at all.

Harriet had never seen a rock with that type of splitting before, a crack splintering down the middle, a strange little triangular chip towards the upper front.

Rocks, she believed, weren’t usually hollow.

Dropping the trowel by her dirt smeared knee, Harriet delved in with her hands, brushing and burrowing.

Maybe it was a toy Dudley had misplaced, and it had unintentionally been trundled in the dirt, lost.

A toy that Harriet could scavenge.

Her first and only toy, twelve years late.

The would-be-toy came away from the hole with a reverberating plunk.

Definitely hollow. 

She pulled it up and shook the rest of the cloying soil off, before, under the keen sunlight, she lifted up her prize.

Immediately, she dropped it, scuttling back like a gangly spider, away, slipping on the grass on her hands and knees.

The skull stared back with empty sockets from the bed of Primula blooms.

A skull.

It was a skull.

A small skull.

A human skull.

A _child’s_ skull. 

* * *

“We’re out of fertilizer.”

Harriet Potter murmured from the crux of the back door, one foot in, one foot out. Petunia, busy at decorating a cake for Dudley at the kitchen counter-top, was humming along to the radio. Harriet’s finger’s tightened on the strap of her satchel, wringing, threadbare sneakers scuffing on the linoleum as her gaze dropped to the floor.

Aunt Petunia was like a leopard.

To survive an encounter, you should _never_ make eye contact.

“Well, go get some! I want those flowers planted by the time the Jones’s come for tea. Lucy has Primula blooms in her garden already.”

Harriet’s shoulder’s sagged, bunching.

“I don’t have any money…”

Petunia’s head whipped around, as she dashed the icing bag across the granite counter.

“Must I do everything around this house! You-“

She lurched closer, palm raising backwards, knuckles sharp, and Harriet flinched on instinct, awaiting the blow. It didn’t come this time, as Petunia caught sight of her freshly manicured hand. She likely didn’t want to risk chipping the polish on Harriet’s cheek.

Huffing, she dug a bony hand into her pocket, slapping a note on the table beside them.

“Go and buy some, then! Or do I have to do that for you too?”

Harriet said no more as she darted as close as she dared, snatching up the money she crinkled in a tight fist.

The jingling of the back door echoed her silent goodbye as she whizzed away like a dragonfly bustling.

Harriet Potter hated lying.

She, perhaps, hated it as much as she detested cooking.

However, she _did_ need the money.

Not for fertilizer, Petunia still had two bags of that stashed at the back of the shed underneath Dudley’s old bike. A bike he had never rode. Nevertheless, train tickets weren’t free. She only hoped the twenty-pound note was enough to get her to King’s Cross station, preferably before Petunia noticed the large hole she had dug in the back garden, and within the hour, when Harriet had not returned from the hardware store and she realised the girl had strayed.

Harriet wouldn’t get a simple smack for that.

No.

She’d get something _much_ worse.

And yet…

_Help will always be given at Hogwarts, Harriet, to those who ask for it._

That’s what Albus Dumbledore, the smartest man Harriet knew, had told her last year after she had taken on a three headed dog and a mountain troll.

When you found a child’s bones hidden in your Aunt’s back garden, it seemed help was the least thing you needed.

Her satchel rattled with her bobbing step.

With a dash of luck, no one would look inside until she got to the Headmaster.

Merlin knew what the muggles would do if she upsided her bag on the train and a whole skeleton spilled out.

* * *

Severus Snape was having a calm, quiet, enjoyable summer holiday.

All until he found Harriet Potter at the bottom of the Headmaster’s office, definitely where she _shouldn’t_ be, something the small child was absurdly excellent at accomplishing, squawking for Dumbledore.

Hogwarts had been let out for the summer months, and rather than, as he ordinarily did, retreating back to Spinner’s End for some much-needed down time, far removed from the insipid, migraine inducing first and second years, and don't get him started on the sixth years with their blundering hormones, Snape had decided to remain at his teaching post for the holiday.

The potion stock at Hogwarts was better than the apothecaries near Spinner’s End, and his recent research into Long-term Polyjuice affects was both sensitive and time consuming work, necessitating only the best of the best ingredients.

By luck, or fate, or by Merlin himself, Dumbledore had been out that sunny Saturday in the Highlands, doing what… Well, _only_ Dumbledore knew what.

It was pure fluke that it was he, Severus Snape, the only man who could possibly make sense of the chaos that would come, unearth it before Dumbledore could go covering up again, who had stumbled across the flushed, panicked girl.

His vial had broken, you see.

Shattered from, a rooky mistake for Snape, completely out of character, being placed too close to the lit cauldron.

The Potions store closet took him on a meandering route passed the staircase leading up to the Headmaster’s office.

He heard the child shouting before he turned the corner.

“Professor! Professor! Please! It’s Harriet Potter! I need your help! Professor! Are you there?”

The foolish chit was shouting at the gargoyle. She startled at Snape’s drawl as he sauntered around the bend. Jumping, eyes flashing wide in surprise, as she clutched at the tatty bag slung over her shoulder.

In truth, everything she wore was shabby, outside her school uniform. The trainers, the right one, was held together with a rope of duct tape. Her frayed socks, too baggy for her spindly legs, had rolled down in clumps at her ankles. The dress was… Something else, green print faded with age; the hem crudely stitched to fit a short child.

For a moment, the barest of heartbeats, Snape felt for the child.

He knew what it was like to wear clothes second hand three owners ago.

He knew what it was like to-

He scowled before any shred of sympathy could take root.

Of course his peaceful day would be ruined by a Potter, of all things.

“What are you doing here? How did you get in?”

He barked, as the girl skidded back a step, clasping at her bag, glancing about her like a Dementor caught in the glow of a Patronus.

“I-… I caught the train to King’s Cross and then another to Hogsmeade… I walked to the castle.”

Severus blinked.

_I walked to the castle._

As if the highly warded castle, wards that had not failed in a thousand years, was a place you could simply stroll into when it was locked down as it were during the holidays.

It didn’t matter.

How she got in was not the problem currently.

Getting her out again so Snape could go back to enjoying his day, was.

In three long strides, he was beside the shrinking child, plucking up her arm, hauling her away down the hall.

“Well, Potter, you’re going to walk right back out again. You shouldn’t be here. Whatever issue you have, you can take it up with Headmaster Dumbledore when term starts again. No sooner.” 

The child fought back, digging her heels into the cobbles of the stone, tugging.

“No! I have to see Dumbledore! I have to show him something! It’s important!”

Snape’s strides slowed as he glanced down to the girl. She shrivelled underneath his hard gaze.

“Well? Go on then. Show me, if it _is_ of the upmost importance that someone sees whatever it is you’ve gotten yourself into this time. By the death grip you have on that cheap bag, I assume it’s inside?” 

She heaved her arm free, and Severus let her go as she clutched the bag tighter to her chest. And then-

Well, she surprised him.

Her nose turned up high into the air, arms folding over her chest, protectively across the bag, and she dismissed him with a sharp, poignant dash of her eye.

Snape, though he would never dare lower himself to actually doing so in front of one of his students, especially a soon to be second year, wanted to laugh.

If the colouring wasn’t off, pale silver instead of black, cold grey instead of unforgivable green, the little chit would look remarkably like Lucius when he was offended.

Dimple and all.

“I _want_ to speak to Dumbledore.”

And that was the exact same haughty order Lucius was inclined to use.

His humour fled in an instant.

He retook hold of her arm.

“You are out of luck as the Headmaster isn’t here currently, and I do not know when he will be back.”

Anew, the struggling started up.

“No! I’ll wait here! You can’t just drag me-… Let go! No! I have to show Dumbledore!”

Sighing deeply, Severus tried valiantly to hold onto any scrap of patience he had.

“Either, girl, you show _me_ or you leave now. You decide.”

She eyed him shrewdly. A sweep from toes to hair. It was such an old look for a young face to hold. Split. It almost jarred Snape to see it there, right in front of him now. _Almost._ Finally, she sighed, fight fleeing her shoulders as she unzipped her bag. Severus let her go as she delved both her hands in.

“I was planting flowers in Aunt Petunia’s garden when I came across this…”

Severus Snape expected a rock. Perhaps a pixie the tiny child had become excited over. Knowing Potter, it was a gnome she thought was out to kill her. Something mundane and banal.

What he didn’t expect was for Potter to produce a bloody skull between her palms.

So much for a cosy Saturday evening reading in front of his fire while sipping brandy.

“You best come with me, Potter. Now.”

* * *

“Who do you think it is?”

Snape sighed for the hundredth time as he leant over the skull with a little knife, scraping a sample off the bone. By the size and shape of the mandible, and the partially closed anterior fontanelle, the skull could only belong to a child between nine and twenty-four months.

The Potter child stood beside him, on top a little crate she was using to peer over the table, too short to see otherwise.

“If I knew that, Potter, I wouldn’t be testing it with an identification potion, now, would I? Think once in a while. It surely wouldn’t hurt you.”

The girl had the audacity to huff at him.

If she was anything but the quintessential Gryffindor she was, Snape might have been proud.

Instead, a pounding at his temple began to strike up a beat.

Balancing the bone dust on the edge of his knife, Snape lifted it over the bubbling cauldron.

It fizzled as it tumbled in.

Three turns of the glass stirring rod turned the mauve a shocking red.

Reaching for his pipette, he took a drop and raised it over to the scrap of parchment he had waiting in front of him.

The drop splattered.

Red rolled to black, seeping, morphing-

“Do you think they were murdered? Why else would they be buried in my back yard? I think-”

Snape ignored the rambling as he held the parchment, words forming and-

_No._

Surely not?

He darted a glance to the child beside him.

Watched her prattle.

Saw those onyx curls.

Those green, green eyes.

A blind man, surely, would look at that child and know it was a Potter on sight.

She had too many of the features.

Too much of James's defiance.

A little _too_ much of James, honestly.

Almost a perfect copy. 

No one would ever question the girl, not with that very-utterly-Potter face, and-

“Are you okay, Professor? Why are you looking at me like that?”

Snape’s gaze fell back to the parchment.

The potion had been perfect.

_Perfect._

He pocketed the piece of parchment.

“Come with me, Pot-… Girl. We need to go to Saint Mungo’s for some… Further tests.”

The girls face lit up.

“So you know who it is?”

Snape didn’t answer. He didn’t think he could right then. He only nodded, as the girl leapt down from her crate to walk beside Snape as they breezed out of the dungeons.

That skull, that child’s skull, unquestionably belonged to Harriet Potter, daughter of James and Lily Potter.

And if that was so, and it _was_ , Snape’s potion couldn’t be faulted…

Who in the name of sweet Circe was the child walking beside him right now?


	2. The Godfather Contract

"Severus, what is the meaning of this?"

Candid, quick to the point, with only a splodge of reserved impatience. Given the circumstances, sauntering into a cramped office in the back-burners of Saint Mungo's at bloody midnight, some murky nook Severus had colonized, Lucius Malfoy thought he was being quite reasonable.

There was a certain level of tiredness that equates to insanity; Lucius, on that early Sunday, had long passed the border several hours ago. He had spent a number of hours Saturday morn at a meeting with the Hogwarts Parental Board, advocating, _again_ , for stricter regulations for teaching posts. Especially the notoriously cursed position of Defence Against the Dark Arts. A move that had been sidestepped by that galling Headmaster anew.

By afternoon, he was in his study, compiling and revising Malfoy beneficiaries, a Trust he had begun in his mid-twenties which rapidly flourished, and diversifying their stock portfolio, always something that caused a twinge in the temple but needed to be done biannually.

Come tea, he only had twenty minutes to sit with his lovely wife and, as of late, snarky son, before he was needed in the stables. Sylvia, his prized, and if he was an honest man, which Lucius Malfoy _wasn't_ very often, adored Irish Wolfhound was expecting a litter. A brood Sylvia had chosen the _stable,_ of all places, to birth in.

Where Narcissa's albino peacocks, finicky little territorial shits as they were, normally roosted in the evening, generating a ludicrous tango where Lucius had to bounce between shooing the overgrown turkey's away, settling the ruffled Griffins bedding in the hay for the night, and keeping a watchful eye on Sylvia.

His dress robes, his favourite _velvet_ dress robes, were ruined beyond repair.

By eight, when he thought things were finally winding down, along came a letter from the owners of Honeydukes. The goblins of Gringotts were charging Mr and Mrs Frankfurt a twenty percent interest on their loan repayments. Fees they had, of course, fallen behind with, and were threatening confiscation of properties by the next morning for the lone missed sum.

A few hours of negotiating, a dash of Malfoy charm for good luck, and a butter wouldn't melt smile ended with Malfoy Inc seizing the assets from the seedy Goblin hands, Gringotts had always been _the_ major competitor when it came to the wizarding stock market for the Malfoy's, with a much fairer two percent interest rate, and a holding stake in Hogsmeade. A place Lucius, until that point, hadn't been able to breach.

He made it home by eleven, changed for bed by half past, and by ten to midnight, he was seconds away from drifting off next to his already slumbering wife.

Whose face should appear in his chamber hearth but that of Severus Snape?

The fiend had demanded their presence at Saint Mungo's _immediately,_ and doused his floo call before Narcissa could so much as wipe the sleep from her eye.

So here he was, next to Narcissa, still in his sleeping robe, bedraggled from a twenty-nine-hour day, trying desperately _not_ to knock Severus over the head with his cane.

What was Severus doing in return for the wonderful restraint Lucius was showing?

Pushing it.

Sitting behind the small desk of the smaller office, he slid forward a porcelain cup with a knuckle, cocking one dark, arching brow.

"Tea?"

Lucius huffed.

He'd known Severus for as long as he had known anyone. Since both were only knee high first years dithering in the Grand Hall of Hogwarts. In that time, Lucius Malfoy had come to understand Severus, as best as _anybody_ could _ever_ claim when it came to the reticent man, and arrived at a notion that was pretty straightforward in principle.

Severus Snape only had two settings.

Bitingly blunt to the juncture of bringing people down to sobbing tears and nervous breakdowns, even those thrice his age and experience, and frustratingly, exasperatingly obtuse. Truly, Lucius thought it was a nasty by-product of straddling two worlds, as his dearest friend had. A heady concoction of both his one-time masters, Albus Dumbledore and Voldemort.

And just like Dumbledore and Voldemort, arguing was a moot point.

Severus would get his way in the end.

He always did.

_Bastard._

Wishing to get this, whatever _this_ was, finished as soon as possible so he could head home and sleep, or perhaps spend a few… Tantalizing hours with Narcissa before their son woke up and could, perhaps, walk in on them as he had done in the past, Lucius strolled over. He doubted the excuse of practicing broom riding naked would work a second time, on a much keener eyed twelve-year-old Draco.

_No._

Narcissa had threatened castration if he forgot the warding spell again.

Lucius much preferred his family jewels exactly where they were, thank you.

Taking the offered seat opposite Severus, Narcissa sat beside him as he plucked up the teacup. He took a sniff, more out of habit than suspicion. Peppermint. His favourite, and perhaps the perfect beverage to dust away the cobwebs still stubbornly clinging to his mind.

Severus watched him as he took a tentative sip.

As soon as his Adam's apple bobbed, Severus struck.

"How many children do you have?"

The answer came immediately, unwittingly.

"One."

_Uh._

Slowly, Lucius glanced down to the teacup in his hand, swirling the dark liquid. He caught it, a shimmer, barely there, hardly a sheen, cresting at the curves.

Peppermint hid the taste impeccably.

He must remember that.

"You've dosed me with Veritaserum."

In an unexpected move, so entirely _not_ him, Severus ran a tired hand down his face, the hint of stubble lurking at the arc of his jaw.

Merlin, the last time Lucius had not seen Severus clean shaven was Samhain eleven years ago when-

_Well._

"I had to be sure, you understand. At least now I know you _think_ you have one child. You believe it enough that you've circumvented the truth potion."

The fine china clinked on the wooden desk as Lucius lowered his cup.

"What do you mean I _think?"_

A chuckle escaped the confines of his chest as Lucius cut a swift, perhaps more than a little worried, glance to his wife beside him.

She looked similarly as troubled.

"I believe me and Narcissa are capable of counting, Sev. I may not have matched your prowess in Potions, but never forget who thrashed your record in Defence, and neither of us can hope to beat 'Cissy in Transfiguration."

Severus didn't smile.

Not so much as a shadow of amusement flickering passed his cold stare.

Instead, stretching for the last filled cup near him, he deliberately slewed it in Narcissa's direction.

The woman in question rolled her eyes and promptly downed the whole lot.

"How many children do you have, Narcissa?"

She met his stare step for step.

"One."

Lucius shuffled in his seat.

"Now that you have the base line query out of the way, are you going to ask us the question you believe you need Veritaserum for?"

The chair legs scraped obnoxiously on the tiled flooring as Severus hastily stood, turning his back on them to march to the narrow window.

"That _was_ the real question."

Right.

Perhaps it wasn't _just_ Lucius who was feeling a little crazy from sleep deprivation. If Severus Snape had forgotten something so plain, Severus forgetting _anything_ was a preposterous idea enough, then surely something sinister this way comes.

"Sev?"

Narcissa probed gingerly.

It was a brilliant tactic on his wife's part. Severus had always had a soft spot for Narcissa, most of their year had. The woman knew how to twist people around pinkies as quickly and easily as one would be wound up into a tornado. Severus, as much as it had to rile the dour man, wasn't immune. Unlike Lucius, who he habitually prodded and goaded and refused just to see the blond frustrated, he always did have trouble saying no to those silver eyes.

Yet, even this didn't turn their friend.

He stood there, hands clasped tightly behind his back, gazing at the swollen moon gleaming in the night sky.

"It's just as I thought. This whole thing _reeks_ of Albus. It has to. He's the only wizard I know capable of such complex magic. Who had access to all of us during the trails after the war. What I don't understand is _why._ What does he gain from this? If Riddle was still here, I could understand. It would be the perfect blow. The irony of a Malfoy being the one to… Albus could never stop himself from doing something so sweetly tongue-in-cheek. Abraxas helped Riddle rise to power, it would be only fair if a-… The Gringotts wards should have caught it. Alerted _someone_ when the Potter account closed. How did he thwart the death clause? The money should have been liquidized by the Goblins. How-… _How."_

Lucius's shoes clacked as he warily strode over. Tentatively, pale skin shining in the low light of the office, he braced a hand on Severus shoulder.

"Severus, old friend… What is going on?"

Severus decisively veered to him, shadows rambling across the sharp angles of his face, cloaking those oil spill eyes of his, making his already serious face further severe.

He looked old.

Old beyond his years.

Old and tired and-

_Angry._

"I too, eight hours ago, believed you only had one child."

A muscle jumped in his sallow cheek.

"Then, quite by accident, I stumbled across your daughter."

"She doesn't know why she's here, does she? You haven't told her."

Narcissa could hear the staggering inhale of breath from beyond her shoulder. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn't take her eyes away from the form, so little, _too little_ , slumbering on the other side of the charmed one-way-glass.

The child likely didn't know she was being watched throughout the day at all.

"I thought it was prudent to gather all the facts I could before I informed her. She believes she's assisting me in identifying the skull she found. It's kept her… Busy."

Narcissa sighed deeply, shaking her head.

"I don't understand. She looks nothing like us. I may have only saw James Potter in passing once or twice, but even I can say that _is_ his child. I would-"

_I would know if she was mine._

As a mother, a loving mother, Narcissa wholeheartedly believed that. No spell, charm or potion could or would ever separate her from her child.

And yet…

Here she was. Standing in an observation room, watching the Possibly-Not-Potter child sleep soundly only a few feet away, crumpled on a hospital cot with a skewed wizarding chess board perched precariously on the table beside her.

_Chess._

A favoured pastime of Narcissa's.

Did the child like gardening too?

Or cooking, like Lucius?

Or-

Severus spoke up from behind her.

"I believe that _is_ the point. No one would ever suspect… It's a variant of Polyjuice Potion I've never seen before. There's remnants of it in her blood still. The only way one would see it was if they had been searching for it to begin with, and knew _exactly_ what to look for. Not only does it change the surface tissue like regular Polyjuice, but it alters the internal structures too. Even the blood wards of Gringotts wouldn't be able to detect it. It's long lasting, near on permanent from what my preliminary examination has found. Once the magical core of the imbibed matures, when the witch or wizard comes of age at seventeen, it's perpetual. Irreversible."

Severus gave a sombre snicker.

"Which is either another stroke of chance, or more is at play, because this is the precise modified Polyjuice Potion I have been creating over the last six months. I think, possibly, I may have invented it before. Perhaps my recent research is a remnant of the mind wipe we've all been subject to. A deep-rooted seed that stubbornly stuck."

Lucius's voice, gruff and low, drifted from the back, where, on a table, he had been scrutinizing a small skull… The small skull Severus said belonged to the real Harriet Potter.

Narcissa's stomach spun.

The Poor child couldn't have been older than two.

Two and _gone_.

"Your knowledge of creating the potion was taken when they, whoever has done this, stole or obstructed the memories of the child. Yet, they neglected to take the desire to create such a potion, and so… Déjà vu."

Severus nodded.

"Conceivably."

Abruptly, Narcissa turned, spun like her stomach was spinning, whirling as her mind was, gazing up at Severus.

"But are you _sure_? Are you sure she's _ours_? That she's my… My… _My_ daughter?"

There was a fire sparking in the grave of her chest, right where her heart was pounding.

It burned like hope.

The same hope that had scorched her so many times before. Narcissa had been pregnant, from what she could remember now that her own memories were in question, six times before.

She only had one son.

The despair of losing a child, particularly before they really had a chance to live, was not something Narcissa would wish on her worst adversaries. There was a boundless void that came. A sense of being a ghost trapped in a room of paper dolls. A lethargic silence that only autumn leaves under frost could truly understand.

And yet, each and every time, there had been burning hope.

This time would be different.

This time it would work.

This time…

This time only came once with her sweet Draco. She would give her life for her son. Her child.

_Children._

Narcissa might have children, plural, and-

Lucius was beside her suddenly, arm slinking around her shoulders, cradling, grounding, drawing as much strength from her as she was from him.

He knew her pain because it was his pain too.

The nights he had spent awake at her side, simply holding her as, all over again, they came home from Saint Mungo's one less presence.

He knew, just as she, the dangers of hope.

Merlin… They could have a daughter, a child, and… And-

Severus gave her a slight smile, rare, sorrowful, but achingly sincere.

"I would never taunt you like this, 'Cissa, if I wasn't _absolutely_ positive. I ran the tests myself. Thrice. She's a Malfoy through and through, underneath the currently very Potter shell."

Her hand snapped up to her mouth, knuckles white with tension, clamping, trying desperately to hold back the sobs that wanted to boil out like steam.

"Who would do this? Who would take my child? Why… I'll kill them. I'll do it, Lucius! I'll kill every single soul that had a hand in this. I'll-"

The dam shattered. Afresh, Lucius held her through it, embracing her pain, his pain, sharing in the way they always had.

_Together._

She and Lucius.

Lucius and her.

She didn't know how long it took her to calm down, but when she did, she made a solemn promise.

Whoever did this would pay.

Narcissa swore it on everything she had.

By her Black blood, they would _pay._

Lucius pulled away only enough to regard Severus.

"Is there a way to reverse this? Regain our memories _and_ undo the Potion?"

Severus scowled, peering through the charmed glass to the girl who turned in her sleep.

"Yes, but it won't be easy. For _none_ of us. Whoever did this did a thorough job. The potion to overturn the Polyjuice variant is easy enough, but the process of it isn't. It's going to be… Painful. I have it at hand, but that is the least of our worries right now."

Narcissa blinked.

"You believe whoever did this will act out if we begin to reverse what they have done?"

Severus nodded.

"They have gone through too much effort to make us-… Make the world believe that girl in there is a Potter, for whatever reasoning they have. If we are not very careful, if we do not get our house straightened, they could strike in a way we cannot anticipate."

Lucius rubbed at his chin, pondering.

"Do you have any suggestions?"

Coming closer, Severus's baritone voice plunged lower, a hum of plot and intrigue tinting at the twists of his tongue.

"Thus far I have kept this discovery to only us. However, the sooner it is made public the better I believe. Whoever did this, and I assume we all have a particular individual in mind, has contacts, high reaching contacts, yet, they've stuck to the shadows all these years. This must mean he _can't_ come out into the open, if he has chosen such drastic measures and subterfuge."

He glanced to the skull.

"The Potter child died at age two, and I suspect your daughter was taken around the same age. I believe if we were to shine a light on what has transpired, with definitive proof and Harriet-… The girl as she _should_ be, that it will limit his actions to ones we can predict. The more paths we cut off for him, the easier it will be to fight. We need to shrink the shadows he's so fond of traversing."

When Severus looked back, met Narcissa's eye, she could see the keen glint taking root. The spur of a knife being sharpened in the dark.

"Thorough job as it is, he couldn't have destroyed all evidence of a child being born. Particularly a child as prominent as a Malfoy heiress. The _first_ female Malfoy to be born in… Three centuries, I believe. Somewhere in the Ministry, in a registrar or lodger, there has to be a record he _,_ or perhaps those who worked for him in this matter, for I highly doubt he could have done all this himself, couldn't reach. One they thought _not_ to reach."

Lucius grinned toothily, plucking up the thread Severus had subtlety dropped at their feet.

"The Godparent Contract. He would know to scrub the births' roll spotless. It would be the first place anybody would investigate. But, if this is _who_ we suspect it is, at least in pulling the strings, with his… Preference towards muggles and muggle tradition, he has possibly overlooked the importance of Godparents to Wizarding children. Given the delicate nature of the Contract, only the Godparent themselves can access the agreement. It's an added layer of protection he might not have been able to violate."

The Godparent Contract, of course!

Ancient magic from the time of Merlin himself was not simply overridden. A bond, hardened by magic, that rivalled that of father and son, mother and daughter. First conceived in a time of immense war and strife for their people, where wizards and witches were lucky to see age fifty, it ensured the protection and longevity of children should their parents perish. It likewise continued stagnant bloodlines, as those chosen for the role were often bachelors, those without children themselves, who could pass on their familial magic through the bond by teaching the children.

Rarely, if the bond was strong enough, if the child and Godparent matched _just_ so, the child could inherit properties from the Godparent. Secret lineage abilities, or predilections and talents the Godparent had.

Draco, even so young, was showing a gifted preference in Potions resembling that of Severus's.

Severus nodded, stiff and strong, a swift tilt up and a sharp drop down.

"That is my theory. Nevertheless, I tried to access them earlier today while the cure to the modified Polyjuice was brewing. I was rejected. I'm listed only once in conjunction to Draco."

Narcissa laughed, bright and clear like a crystal bell.

"That's because you wouldn't _be_ the Godfather."

Severus slanted a brow, and Narcissa rushed to ease the inadvertent insult she had flung his way in her enthusiasm.

"Me and Lucius agreed, early on in our marriage, before the-…"

_Before the struggle for children and all those lonely nights staring at the empty cradle-_

She resolutely shook her head and gathered herself.

"We agreed when we had children, he would choose the Godparent for the son and I the daughter. I've always known he would choose you. How could I not considering how close you are? So I looked elsewhere."

Severus hummed deep in his chest.

"Who would you have chosen?"

Who would she have chosen?

As much as she loved Bellatrix, Narcissa had since she was a little girl who had spent many an afternoon trailing her older sister like a puppy, the whole goal of a Godparent was to search out of the genetic pool to strengthen the child with outsider magics not yet brought into the family by marriage.

No.

Neither would she have chosen Regulus for that matter.

There was only one other choice she could see herself making, given that she was missing crucial memories.

Her shoulders slumped with the realisation.

"Antonin Dolohov. He was always my closest friend at Hogwarts. However, it is futile. He's serving a life sentence in Azkaban. There's no way to get him to the Department of Magical Bonds."

Lucius swept his tongue over his teeth behind pursed lips, even now joining the dots, crossing the t's and skirting impossibilities as Malfoy's were inclined to do.

A slippery bunch they were.

A slippery _loyal_ bunch, if you managed to earn their quasi-unattainable favour drenched in high standards.

You never had a real friend until you made an ally in a Malfoy, the saying went.

Neither had you ever had an enemy until you crossed a Malfoy, it ended.

"Not _so_ hopeless. If I file for a rehearing of his case with the Wizengamot, perhaps give some pretext of missing some priceless heirloom I believe Dolohov took, he will be ordered into the Ministry for questioning. We don't need to get him out. We only need a vial of his blood to retrieve the Contract. From there, when he's in the security chamber for interrogating, I can convince a few Aurors who owe me certain favours to… Turn a blind eye for a minute or two. Long enough to get me in and allow me to take a vial. In the end, I could simply say I was mistaken. A donation to the Wizengamot will sooth any annoyance."

Severus smirked.

"Dolohov was arrested two months before the end of the war, was he not?"

Narcissa nodded.

"If Dolohov _is_ the Godfather, he might still have memories of the girl. Memories _he_ couldn't take if Antonin was in Azkaban before he could wipe him. Dolohov could be the key to all this."

Lucius smartened in his sleeping robe, regal even here, at Severus's suggestion.

"I'll file the request as soon as I leave here tonight. Dolohov should be lifted from Azkaban by noon if I stress the urgency. In the meantime, to stop any… Sticky fingers from interfering and snatching the Contract before we can, we should reverse the Polyjuice, and give a leak to the Daily Prophet. If the public is watching, _he_ will be less likely to act, and might be distracted enough by this blowing up in the public sphere not to see us sneaking in the backdoor."

Severus nodded.

"Get Dobby to leave a note on Rita Skeeter's desk-"

" _Not Dobby."_

Lucius barked, abruptly glowering.

Severus frowned at his old friend.

"Why ever not? We cannot have it tracing back to you, or it might provoke-"

"I _said_ not Dobby."

Narcissa could practically hear the grinding gears of Severus's mind churn over.

"Lucius… Why not Dobby?"

Lucius scowled darkly, unexpectedly bewildered by his own sharp tone.

"I-… I don't know. He's-"

Lucius shook his head fast enough to flutter his platinum locks around his broad shoulders.

"Filthy creature. I can't stand him. The only reason I still keep him in my house is because he's been in the family so long."

The ball dropped, and Narcissa glanced to Severus just as the taller man peered at her.

"Remnant seed."

Lucius grimaced at the united voices of both his wife and best friend.

"Excuse me?"

Severus sighed.

"I believe, whatever happened ten years ago, Dobby had something to do with it. Perhaps your memory was erased from what precisely happened, but your detest for the elf has become… disproportionate. You like Twinky, well enough."

Lucius faltered.

"Twinky has never… Never…"

He trailed off unsure, quickly lost, as Severus drawled in that way only he could ever pull off. Sardonic and slicing.

"Can't remember what you were going to say?"

For a long while, Lucius only frowned before, finally, he shook his head in the negative. Narcissa slunk to his side, gently laying a warm hand on his back. Idly, she wondered if she too had predetermined notions that she wasn't aware of. Detest and fears connecting back, like the web of a spider, invisible to the naked eye far away, to things she could not remember.

Severus straightened out, brisk and towering.

"Lucius, you go and file the request. I'll go and leak the new information to the Daily Prophet after I give the girl the remedy to the Polyjuice-"

Severus was already walking in a billow of black robe, heading for the door, as he spoke.

Narcissa doggedly stepped away from Lucius, crossed the distance, and planted herself firmly in front of Severus's swerving path. The man nearly rolled right into her, but she held fast and true, gazing up.

" _No_. I will wait here and give the child the antidote once she awakens, while Lucius goes and files the request, and you leak the news."

Severus frowned down at her.

Narcissa didn't so much as shrink.

In fact, she only stood taller, as Severus, knowing that gleam in her eye intimately, took a step back.

It would have been a funny sight indeed, in any other conditions. By now, Severus should know better than to play a game of who-breaks-first-loses with a Black.

For Narcissa Malfoy _was_ a Black, make no mistake in that, through and through, despite the name change.

It was time people began to remember that.

"Narcissa, given the circumstances, and the expected… Problematic reaction the girl is going to have, not only to this new turn in her life, but to the potion itself as it strips away what has been melded to her magical core for years, I do not believe the best-"

Her hand shot out in front of her, palm up, ready.

_Waiting._

"You said it yourself, Sev. It is painful. She will need to be watched as she undergoes the change. You can't do that if you are leaving to release the news too. Severus… She is _my_ daughter. I _need_ to do this. I need to… I need to _be_ there."

_As I haven't all these years._

Ten years…

Gone, and Narcissa would never get those years back. She had missed-… Been _robbed_ of her first step. Her first broom ride. Being called mother for the first time. First words. Reading bedtime stories she, herself, had grown up with. Being awoken in the middle of the night from a nightmare, and making room in the master bed for the child to sleep between her and Lucius. So many moments, lost, stolen from her.

 _Never_ again.

Narcissa would never allow another moment to be taken from her.

Spotting something in her grave face, perhaps the futility of fighting, Severus slowly reached into the breast pocket of his robe. A small vial, deep and crisp green like a freshly plucked sprig of mint, was produced. Gently, he placed it in her open palm.

Narcissa's finger's coiled around the cool glass protectively.

"Do not say I did not warn you. The girl has a temper. Now that I think of it, topping your own, with the penchant for dramatics Lucius is so fond of."

Lucius reeled back.

"I beg your pardon! I-"

On her way back to the charmed glass, Narcissa patted Lucius's heckled shoulder kindly.

"Hush, dear. You _are_ theatrical, and I love you all the more for it."

A huff was her only answer. Narcissa peered through the glass. The girl had rolled around once more, screwed herself into a tight ball, hugging knees to chest. Yes. She did look so very much like James Potter, but if you looked, _really_ , truly looked, there were hues to be seen buried in the between spaces.

A curl more coil like Bellatrix than the muddle of James.

The shadow of a hidden dimple, more flagrant, like Abraxas.

The refined sweep of a nose, a crumb haughtier, like Lucius.

Ghosts hiding in ghosts.

Narcissa turned away, pupils sharpened.

"Shall we begin?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NEXT CHAPTER PREVIEW:
> 
> "Finally see the truth, do you? Taken you lot long enough. Still, I'm afraid you've come floo calling at the wrong wizard's hearth. I may remember little Lyra, alright, but I'm not the Godfather."
> 
> Lucius huffed and pressed closer over the bolted table.
> 
> "Dolohov, I do not have time to be playing guess who with you while Dumble-"
> 
> Swiftly, Antonin lunged, as close as his runic chains would let him, towards Lucius.
> 
> "Quiet! There are ears listening, and they listen everywhere…"
> 
> Immediately, Lucius's mouth clamped shut, and only when silence settled did Antonin relax back into his seat, gaunt and lean in his dishevelled Azkaban regalia. Slyly, he eyed the Aurors standing guard outside the door.
> 
> "I can't say much. Not much at all. He didn't have time to wipe me clean before they rushed me to Azkaban, but he did manage a bloody gag hex. But, perhaps… Yes. I can ask. A question you should ask yourself who else can do. Find the answer, find the Godfather."
> 
> Antonin wiggled closer, chains rattling, and licked at his chapped lips. His hoarse voice drifted between them, low and cool, like a breeze wafting through a graveyard.
> 
> "Tell me, friend… Has Lyra started speaking to snakes yet?"


	3. Just You

Harriet Potter slipped awake to the echo of gentle humming drifting in the air. Blinking to a sudden alert, she scrubbed at her eyes with the heel of her hands, kicking the sheets tangled around her ankles off as she rolled to a sit.

A woman Harriet had never seen before was, well, she was standing at her window, by the small little table the room came with, putting flowers, of all things, into a glass vase.

She was a tall woman, willowy even in her dense, fur lined cloak, very pale, nearly deathly so, with long blond hair and bright blue eyes. She was very pretty, Harriet would admit. A bit snooty looking, but very pretty.

Like the princess from the old fairy tales.

Harriet was more of an imp, herself.

Tiny and tricky.

However, there was something familiar there. A clear angle of her pointed chin. The slope of her nose…

Harriet couldn’t put her finger on it, still a bit staggered from sleep, but she was sure, somewhere, some-when, she had seen those things before.

The woman popped the last flower in its glass prison, fingers pausing as she thumbed the yellow petal. She didn’t turn around when she spoke to Harriet, didn’t so much as glance her way, though she must have known she was awake now.

She merely gazed down at the flower in her hand, a glimmer of a smile flittering across her face.

“I’ve always had a soft spot for sunflowers. The way they stretch for the sun, head held high, despite all the dirt and grime they had to climb through to reach it.”

Her voice was clear and cold, similar to crystal, bolstered in the drawl of the Queen’s English. Cultured, some might call it. Not uncle Vernon. He would call her ostentatious, a word Harriet didn’t quite understand yet, but by his tone when he said it, she knew it was unflattering. Even when, the times they had guests around, Aunt Petunia ditched her Cokeworth brogue for a poor mimicry of the Queen’s English.

Harriet _did_ know what a hypocrite was.

The woman gave a last sweep of her thumb to the sunflower petal before she righted the vase and turned around. She smiled at Harriet, gentle and soft, as she idly arched a hand about her, indicating to the bare, whitewashed room around them.

“I thought you might enjoy something to brighten up this dreary place.”

Harriet pivoted on the bed, legs dangling from the edge, before she managed to bite down on the urge to flee. Her hands, however, did tighten on the edge, creasing the already scrunched sheets.

To Harriet, who had only survived so far by understanding the worst was always what Vernon or Petunia _didn’t_ say, heard the implication loud and clear.

She would only need this room brightened up if she was to be _staying_ in it.

Harriet loathed being trapped.

“Who are you?”

The pretty woman delicately coughed, running a wayward hand down the front of her robes, ironing out imaginary furrows in the emerald silk and white fur cuffs. Her chin skewed high in dignity stained with pride.

“I am Narcissa Malfoy. I believe you know my son? Draco? I am your…”

She cut herself off, mouth abruptly closing. Lips pursed with whatever secret her teeth were grinding back. Gently, she came over, perching herself on the end of Harriet’s cot, somehow making even this look stately, as if she was sitting on a throne rather than an iron brace with a small lumpy mattress.

At once, Harriet scooted away, up towards the top, crushing the threadbare pillow against the bitter brick wall. Her legs folded up, caved in, hunched to her chest, thin arms looping around to secure herself into a ball.

She could see it now.

She could name the familiarity.

_Draco._

The boy really _did_ resemble his mother quite startlingly.

And if his mother, in turn, was anything like the ferret…

Narcissa looked dismayed, for a flash, by the sudden retreat Harriet took. Nevertheless, the shadow was gone long before it was ever truly there, and she was back to smiling tenderly.

Slowly, so slowly, as if Harriet was a feral cat spooked by too fast movements, Narcissa reached for the bedside cabinet, plucking up the wizarding chest set Harriet had spent last night playing by herself, when Snape had dumped her in this room to run some more ‘tests’ on the skull, and held it out between them.

“I came here to talk with you. How about a game of chess while we do so, yes? I’ve been told you enjoy the game.”

Talk _with_ you. 

Not _to_ you. 

There was a large difference there, for a word only two letters longer, that many people often didn't realise. The former meant you had some input, the latter meant 'I'm going to speak and you're going to listen'. It was a difference that eased some of Harriet's abrupt caution. She was used to the to, not so much the with, but she found she quite liked the prospect. 

Harriet eyed her from the crest of her kneecap.

Narcissa's joy was bright on her face. As bright as the sunflower petals she had been stroking moments prior. Harriet didn’t trust it. Adults only ever, in her short life, got happy when Harriet was going to get something that decidedly didn’t make _her_ happy.

Harriet’s begging to be let out the under stairs cupboard had merely made Petunia smile wider.

“If this is about the Remembrall or Draco falling from his broom during Quidditch… I’m not sorry.”

Instead of getting angry, as Harriet was expecting, there was-

There was laughter.

Light and strong.

Like sunbeams skittering across floors. The kind that picked up dust floating in the air, but impossibly, made that dust sparkle like gold. 

“Yes, he did tell me about your… Squabbles.”

Narcissa lowered the chess set into her lap, a wistful hue pulsing across her gaze.

“The amount of arguments me and Andy had when we were your age… All the times Father had to tear us apart as Bella tried to get between us… No wonder he became grey at thirty. Oh, to be young again. Where the only worry to be had was your sister stealing your favourite brooch…”

Narcissa came back to herself with a soft head-shake, rattling away memories of long ago.

“But no, that is not why I am here. I am here because… Well, we have much to talk about, you and I. Now, about that game of chess?”

Once more lifting the board, she wiggled it, tempting, enticing.

Harriet sluggishly nodded.

Narcissa beamed.

Although, undoubtedly, this was Malfoy’s mother, a person Ron’s head would explode from if he knew Harriet was sitting here with, talking to, she seemed too… Gentle and kind.

She hadn’t hurt her.

Or shouted at her.

And, really, Harriet did adore wizarding chest…

One game couldn’t hurt.

Harriet only jolted a little when Narcissa, with a flap of her hand, conjured another table and two chairs in the middle of the room. Magic so above what Harriet could do currently, done with such ease, as simple as breathing, that it almost seemed like… Well, magic.

A whole twelve months after her discovery of being a witch, and Harriet still had trouble reconciling magic was very much _real_.

She thought she would never lose that spark of wonder at seeing it.

Coming to a stand, Narcissa glided to the table, placing the chess board upon it. Pulling out a chair, she held it out for Harriet. 

“Come on then, up and out. Let us play.”

Harriet slunk from the bed.

The hall outside the security chamber of interrogation was charmed a frightfully lurid yellow. Never one for such obviously tawdry tastes, notably paired with _those_ lavender curtains; whoever decided on this colour scheme needed a swift killing curse to the back of the head he concluded, Lucius Malfoy found himself leering as he waited for the Aurors to fix Dolohov into his restraints in the chamber over.

“Is this going to take all day? I am a very busy man.”

The Auror who stood sentry at the chamber door, a motley fellow, squat and square in equal measure, shook his head.

“All done, Messer Malfoy. Head on in.”

Lucius walked on by, feigning to pause at the crux of the door to straighten his waistcoat. The guards at the end of the hall, two in total, from their vantage point could not see his hand slither into his pocket from the placement of his back. Neither could they see a small bag of galleons, plucked from said pocket, make their way to the palm of the motley man. Lucius’s voice slumped to a whisper.

“For the fee of the curse breaker to mend your observations spells, and of course, a donation for all your wonderful help this day…”

The motley man frowned at him, a bit slow on the upkeep Lucius assumed, mouth opening, seconds away from arguing their observation spells were well and truly fine in the interrogation room, when, thank Circe, something spun upstairs and his mouth snapped shut with a clack of teeth.

He quickly pocketed the heavy pouch.

“Of course. Nasty hex it was. Shut the whole ward down for thirty minutes. Thank you.”

_Thirty minutes._

That was all Lucius had until those outside noticed the spells were down, the ward would be back up and functioning from whatever spell the motley man decided to use to break it, and the Aurors would be able to see and hear what he did and said inside.

Plenty of time.

Merlin commend governmental corruption.

It made his life so much easier. 

With a sharp nod, Lucius marched through the door.

The door shut behind him with a muted thud.

He lingered at the threshold, silent, giving the man outside time to act, and observed the man before him.

Dolohov was chained to the lone table of the room, head bent so far down Lucius could only see the crown of his hair. He was… Reduced from what he had been, but no less terrifying, even clad in the rags and ruins of Azkaban.

The light in the room throbbed to a quivering scarlet.

The wards were down.

The door behind Lucius disappeared.

A containment fail-safe should the suspect being temporarily housed in the room should try to escape during a disruption.

Finally, they were alone.

Dolohov looked up, glanced through the screen of his tangled hair, and with a rattle of chains and a kick, the chair opposite him skittered out for Lucius to take. The iron grated chair groaned underneath his added weight.

Fabric wasn’t allowed near Azkaban convicts.

The Aurors were too afraid they’d strip the clothe and strangle someone with the tartan ribbons. 

"Finally see the truth, do you? Taken you lot long enough. Don’t look at me like that, Lucius. Of course I know why you’re here… Though, I am surprised you aren’t ‘Cissa… Still, I'm afraid you've come floo calling at the wrong wizard's hearth. I may remember little Lyra, alright, but I'm not the Godfather."

Lucius huffed and pressed closer over the bolted table.

"If you know why I am here, then you know how… Sensitive this issue is. Dolohov, I do not have time to be playing guess who with you while Dumble-"

Swiftly, Antonin lunged, as close as his runic fortified chains, chains that lapped all his magic from his wilting body, would let him towards Lucius.

"Quiet! There are ears listening, and they listen everywhere…"

Immediately, Lucius's mouth clamped shut, and only when silence settled did Antonin relax back into his seat, gaunt and lean in his dishevelled Azkaban regalia. Slyly, he eyed the Aurors standing guard outside the door.

Or where they would have been posted, if the door still existed.

"I can't say much. Not much at all. He didn't have time to wipe me clean before they rushed me to Azkaban, but he did manage a bloody gag hex. But, perhaps… _Yes_. I can ask. A question you should ask yourself who else can do. Find the answer, find the Godfather."

Antonin wiggled closer, chains clattering, and licked at his chapped lips. His hoarse voice drifted between them, low and cool, like a breeze wafting through a graveyard.

"Tell me, friend… Has Lyra started speaking to snakes yet?"

The little marbled man atop Harriet’s rook tower raised his sword high, and with a thrusting stab, skewered the bishop, who had been sneaking up to her knight, who buckled from his granite pedestal, sceptre rolling across the checker ground.

The knight Harriet had purposefully abandoned in the open as a lure.

The dark bishop magic’d off the board, as Narcissa grinned, despite losing a main piece, and chuckled.

“You really do have a talent for this, don’t you? Draco is hopeless, no matter how much I try and teach him. Too impatient, my little dragon. He doesn’t understand sacrifice quite like you do.”

_He doesn’t understand sacrifice quite like you do._

There’s something there, in that sentence, something Harriet couldn’t name, that sat uncomfortably in the very pit of her gut. An iron poker not quite hot, but not yet cold. A vulnerability of being seen more than you ever wished to be seen.

Sensing her discomfort, Narcissa promptly pushed out a pawn, as she came to rest her chin on a prim fist, watching Harriet in much the same manner that she, herself, watched the board.

Narcissa Malfoy, Harriet decided, was the most confusing adult she had run across yet.

There was nothing interesting about Harriet at all.

Not anything that would warrant such unwavering observation.

“Why do _you_ think I’m here?”

Harriet quickly moved her rook back. Narcissa was baiting her with that pawn. Her other bishop, partially hidden by her queen, which is what she obviously wanted Harriet to focus on, was in striking distance should Harriet take the leap.

“If it isn’t about Draco… Then it must be the skull I found. Everybody whose seen it seems awfully interested in it.”

Narcissa hummed as she played with the crown of her king, before nudging him, too, backward.

“And why would _I_ be interested in the skull?”

_Bingo._

She moved her Queen to the right, across the small space of outright warfare, and snatched a rook.

“Does it belong to one of your…”

Harriet didn’t finish.

It seemed, as socially clumsy as she was, something you just didn’t say so blasé. Yet, the skull of her own child was the only thing Harriet could think of that would bring a Malfoy, as pleasant as Narcissa was turning out to be, to her door.

During her free time yesterday, between helping Snape in the apothecary of Saint Mungo’s, where he had finally said he needed to do some research and she should rest for a while, though he wouldn’t allow her to go home because of how late it was, Harriet had come up with a hundred theories for the skull.

From Changelings to slain princes, like those of the boys locked in London Tower.

How exactly they had ended up in her, or rather Aunt Petunia’s backyard, however, kept escaping her.

Narcissa cleaved her bishop with a knight.

“No, the poor child wasn’t mine.”

Harriet had not seen that coming.

Both the no and her bishop being beheaded.

She frowned down at the board.

Such a serious scowl for a young face.

“Did Snape ask you for help identifying it too?”

Narcissa smiled at her, and this time it was…

_Different._

Slight. Scarcely there. So extraordinarily, exceedingly sad.

“No. You see, we’ve already discovered who it belonged to.”

Harriet glowered and knocked over her last rook with a knight.

“Then why am I still here? Snape said…”

Anew, she cut herself off.

Adults lie.

Harriet knew that.

They _always_ lied.

Oh, Vernon and Petunia were going to be so mad at her when she got back.

She wouldn’t be allowed out her closet for a good fortnight.

Perhaps a month.

That was the _best-case_ scenario.

Somehow, someway, Narcissa seemed to read her mind, her frantic spiralling and fear.

“I do not believe you will be returning to your home anytime soon. You are here because… Because that skull belonged to Harriet Potter.”

Harriet blinked owlishly. The game of chess forgotten.

“But _I’m_ Harriet Potter.”

There was a terrible conviction to her voice. Conviction interspersed with tentative confusion. As if someone had come along, all so suddenly, and told her the sky didn’t exist. Of course it existed… She could _see_ it.

There was the sun.

There was the moon.

There were the stars and clouds and comets.

There was Harriet Potter.

_Her._

Narcissa shifted across the table, knocking the chess pieces around, right on over to her lax hand that had gone abruptly limp beside the checkerboard, and rested it over her own. 

It was a warm and soothing hand.

Nothing like Petunia’s,

Nothing like Vernon’s.

A mother’s hand.

Gentle and coaxing.

Or what Harriet, little orphan Harriet, imagined a mother’s hand to be, which, frightfully, she had done so many a lonely night staring at the patches of damp in the masonry of her cupboard.

Sometimes she pretended they were faces.

Her mother and father smiling at her.

Sometimes she pretended she could feel their hands in her own, or brushing the curls from her forehead.

Only sometimes, she swore.

Which really meant every night.

Narcissa looked close to tears. Harriet could see them gleaming on her pale lashes like dew drops on blades of grass, though, as the dew drop did, they willfully clutched and refused to fall.

“Oh, sweet, sweet child. No. No you’re not.”

Harriet did, as the person who was told the sky did not exist after spending a lifetime seeing it, the only thing she could when someone came along and smashed your world with something false.

_Laugh._

She laughed hard.

Lucius Malfoy came striding out the chamber hall and into the main atrium of the Ministry of Magic, regal and proper, not a hair out of place, calm, composed-

Inside he was a bloody disaster.

Thoughts coming and going, thousands, speaking all at once and-

_Snakes._

If what Dolohov had hinted was true, Lyra could talk to snakes.

_Parselmouth._

There was only one other Parselmouth Lucius knew of.

One person, if she _did_ posses the gift, she could have gained it from.

Oh, gentle Mordred.

They were _fucked._

As soon as his foot hit the main marbled floor, a flash of hot, white light burst in his face.

“Lord Malfoy! Any comment on the recent rediscovery of your daughter? Was the perpetrator Dolohov? What memory hexes were used? Is that why you were recorded as visiting him this morning in the interrogation chamber? Is there-“

Reporters, from old hands smoking cigars at the back, to the new dogs with flushed cheeks scribbling feverishly in the front, surrounded him.

It seemed at least Severus had gotten his job done.

Lucius straightened out, standing tall.

The show must go on, as his father used to tell him.

“I cannot say much as of yet, but beg the public's support, and ask for privacy during this trying time for my family. We are all extremely hurt by this, and we need sincere respect during this time of healing. Especially my daughter. As for the perpetrator of this heinous crime, they are still at large, and I have but one thing to say to them. I _will_ find you. The Wizengamot will be opening a full-scale inquiry into this matter Monday. If anybody… Anybody at all has any information, perhaps a sighting of something strange they remember witnessing ten years ago, anything at all, please contact Auror Weddick. Every bit helps. Thank you.”

The reporters, like a band of feral dogs who had sniffed out a still meowing bone to gnaw amongst them, went wild, crying and hollering, spitting and sputtering.

Lucius determinedly pressed through, elbowing a few who got to close in the ribs ‘accidentally’, skulking and sliding through the crowd, dense and heavy that had formed at the commotion, angling for the exit.

By the time he got out the Ministry, a good fifteen minutes later, he found Snape waiting for him outside on the grand steps, lurking, as he always did, in the shadows.

“Preened for the reporters?”

Lucius grimaced as the man met his gate, a fast parade, to the floo network just outside.

“I gave them enough to squawk over for the next month, and send letters to drown the Wizengamot in logistics. This won’t be out of the headlines for just as long. It will give us enough cover to move.”

Severus nodded.

“Did you retrieve the vial?”

Lucius’s steps faltered before he picked up pace once more.

“No. It’s a superfluous issue. Dolohov remembers the girl, Lyra he called her, but he isn’t the Godfather.”

_Lyra._

That was his dearly departed mother’s name.

He had always sworn if he had a girl…

Unexpectedly, it was all so achingly… _Real._ Real and genuine and tangible. Until that point, Lucius had felt as if he had been… Dreaming. A shade too vague. It was only now, on the other side of the chasm, with the fog lifted, he thought he might have been in shock over the last day, rushed away in the tide of everything-happening-all-at-once. And then he had heard the name, and she wasn’t just the girl anymore, or the could-not-be-Potter, but Lyra. _His_ daughter.

Lucius Malfoy had a daughter. 

Little Lyra…

Little Lyra who was in immense peril.

The pair, one so light and one so dark, made it to the open floo network. Lucius plucked up a handful of powder before ducking in, Severus’s bottomless voice trailing him quicker than the man did.

“We must regroup. Decide our next move if we can’t extract the contract. Perhaps-“

“Oh, I know _who_ is.”

Severus gave him a withering stare from the side of his eye as he stood next to him.

“ _Do_ keep me in suspension, Lucy. It is not like we are on a time limit, or at risk, or-“

Lucius raised the handful of periwinkle blue powder.

“Tom Riddle.”

He threw it down, calling for Saint Mungo’s, just as Severus’s head snapped right around, wide-eyed, violent curse engulfed by the green flames.

“Please, open the door!”

Narcissa shouted through the wooden door to the adjacent bathroom, beating desperately with her fist as she did so. A little voice came roaring back from the other side, just as inflamed.

“No! Not until I see Dumbledore or you go away!”

Narcissa couldn’t stop the barbed response flying from her mouth.

“You’re not seeing that horrid man ever again, if I can help it!”

She winced.

That was positively the _wrong_ thing to say, heated by emotion, and yet, it was out before she could reel it in.

The child’s rebuttal was just as swift.

“Then I’m not coming out ever again!”

Narcissa sighed deeply, forehead thumping on the wood, hand stalling, before she sluggishly spun, back pressed against the cool wood, and she slid down to the ground. The skirts of her robe fluffed out about her legs. For once, she didn’t care about any wrinkles that may form.

The girl had abruptly stopped laughing when she realised Narcissa wasn’t joining in, and neither _would_ she. When the child had noticed there was no joke to be found, no ploy or prank or hoax, as Narcissa began to digress into a long-winded mess about what they believed had taken place ten years ago, she had become wide eyed.

Wide eyed and pallid, and, quick as could be, quicker than any Cornish Pixie, she had dashed across the chamber, diving for the bathroom, before Narcissa could grab her or reason and, finally, slammed the oak door right into the blonde’s face. 

She had bolted the door with lock _and_ spell.

The latter a case of accidental magic, Narcissa assumed. Enacted in her panic to… Get away.

Narcissa _could_ get through. Barge in in a flurry. She doubted the accidental magic was so strong to hold her back, but-

Well, that would be beside the point, would it not?

If she was trying to ease the child’s panic, blowing a hole in the door seemed a bit counterproductive. Far too dramatic too. Much more to Lucius’s tastes. It would only scare the girl further, and perhaps, worst of all, begin sowing the seeds of mistrust. 

_Just what Dumbledore would want and need right now._

So Narcissa had spent the last fifteen minutes knocking away, thud, thud, thudding, trying to draw her out from the den she had buried herself in. Narcissa had tried everything. An offer of cake and sweets, something that would have tempted Draco out long ago, another game of chess, anything she could want.

The girl was having absolutely none of it.

Severus had been right, as he typically was.

The girl had Lucius’s stubborn streak, and the maddening Malfoy proclivity to cutting off their own noses to spite their faces.

“We only want to help you.”

Narcissa heard something bump in the hollow of the other room.

“No! You’re lying! Adults always lie. I’m a Potter! I am! I’m not… I’m not Malfoy’s _twin._ I’m nothing like him at all!”

Narcissa chuckled, and again, it was the _wrong_ reaction.

She just couldn’t seem to get it right.

“This only shows me you _are_.”

Draco, when Lucius had refused getting the boy a new firebolt just a month ago at the start of summer vacation, had sealed himself in their pantry and threatened to stay there until he got it, claiming the food would last him months.

It was a good choice for a siege site, she would give her son that.

Nevertheless, the often impassioned but easily bored boy only lasted six hours before he had come tumbling out, covered in flour, begging his mother for a hot chocolate because he didn’t know how to make one, and Lucius, in a shrewd step, had barred the house elves from delivering any to Draco.

Lucius, in the exceptionally uncommon occurrence of one of their spats, arguing sporadically in a marriage was healthy, would secure himself away in his study.

It seemed, to Narcissa at least, a Malfoy’s ultimate insult they could think of to their brethren was to deprive them of their exemplar company.

“No I’m not! I’m a _Potter_! My father was James Potter! He was… He was a good man and he played quidditch, just like me… And Lily… I have her eyes and people constantly say so… And… And…”

She sounded so lost.

Lost and afraid.

Narcissa’s voice flattened to something weak and subdued.

“Would it be so bad to be one of us? To have a brother? A mother? A father? All who very much care for you? Because we do, child. We really do. We only want what’s best for you. Please… Open the door.”

Narcissa sensed an opening in the time it took the child to reply.

Pause was good.

It meant she was listening.

“No… No. Dumbledore will set it right. He’ll… He’ll fix it. He fixes everything.”

Wasn’t that the tragedy of all this?

The child thought she only had Dumbledore to rely on. Possibly the tyrant who had done all this. Dumbledore himself, surely, had seen to it that this was exactly what happened. Someone secluded, alone in the world, so young and naive as all children were, was infinitely more malleable.

It was that trust, of a forlorn child, Narcissa had to chip away at. She couldn’t overtly attack Dumbledore’s character, not to the small girl, for she would hear nothing of the sort. The man had weaselled himself in too deep for far too long.

If Narcissa argued, it would only drive her more into his awaiting arms.

Instead, Narcissa sat there, back to the door, resting in the ensuing silence. Her head lolled on the wall, gaze drifting to the ceiling. She could not see the sky. She found no comfort, as she normally did at the action she had done since she was a little girl. Gazed to the sky for strength. To the sun and stars her family were named after, as if they, the stars themselves, were her guardians.

Stars couldn’t lie-

_Lie._

Adults lie, the child had said.

That is what she anticipated everywhere she turned.

_Lies._

Then, perhaps, Narcissa could show her truth.

Minutes, or perhaps hours later, she spoke.

Shattered.

“His name was Armond.”

It had been years since that name had passed her lips, and she found herself smiling over the forgotten taste.

Sweet and sour.

“He was such a bonny boy. He never cried… I remember that. I’ll remember that until my dying day. He _never_ cried. He was so full of sunlight, my Armond, that sometimes, when I remember him, I think of him glowing. Always smiling. Always giggling. He was mine and Lucius’s first-born son… Our first everything.”

A tapping from the other side of the door.

Footsteps coming closer.

“He lived the longest. He died… He died when he was four. SMCV, the Healers told us. Do you know what that is?”

The girl took a while to answer, low and soft, gentle like feathers floating in the air.

“No…”

Once more, she looked up, pictured the night sky instead of speckled tile. She sucked in a great breath through her nose, hoping, with it, strength would come too. This was the first time, outside Lucius, she had ever spoken a word of this. It felt… Oddly good. Like finally taking a cauldron off the fire.

“Sudden Magical Core Volatility. Babies magical cores are born loose, lax for growing and maturing alongside the body. The core sets by age five. SMCV is a rare malady. Something goes wrong in the process of fixing. The net of the core can’t join properly. Threads become feeble. Some become lifeless altogether. Disintegration… The core becomes unstable… Erratic… Explosive.”

She suffocated on the word, a fist around her throat, wringing. Explosive was the polite term to call what happened in SMCV. Still, now that she had started, Narcissa found she couldn’t stop speaking.

“It’s only meant to affect one in one hundred thousand. And you never… You never think it’s going to be _you._ There’s an arrogance people have when it comes to illness. _Never you_.”

She had been so too.

Never her.

Not her children.

She had been such a fool… An arrogant, conceited fool.

She shook her head.

“It’s only in particular bloodlines. Lucius… Lucius is clear. It was my… My blood that-“

She coughed, and it sounded damp and raspy.

“It runs in my family, you see. They call it the Black burden behind closed doors. It was amazing my father and uncle had so many surviving children. It makes me wonder how many they had to bury in the… My cousin, Sirius, refused to have children because of it. Of course, before he-… But it… It came from _me_ , and Armond paid the price.”

The child’s voice came directly from the other side of the door. She must have come closer. Perhaps she was sitting just as Narcissa was, back to back, pain to pain, divided only by a slip of wood.

“It wasn’t your fault.”

Startlingly, Narcissa realised that this was the first time someone had ever said that out loud to her.

Naturally, Lucius did not blame her. She knew that. Truly, she did. Yet, he too had been grieving as she had been, and, though he thought it, though it was intimated at by all his actions, those words had never passed his lips. Later, when the dust settled, as they began trying for more children, both young and hopeful the next would be different, neither Lucius or Narcissa could stomach talking of Armond for long periods of time.

Narcissa had not known how desperately she had needed to hear that, until a child-

_Her_ child had said it. 

Narcissa placed her hand on the wood of the door, gaze falling from the ceiling, fingers splayed. She thought of the girl on the other side, doing the same.

Narcissa didn’t need the stars.

It was this that gave her strength.

Her children.

“Oh, you sweet, sweet girl…”

With a sniff and a delicate wipe to her eyes, Narcissa pressed on.

“We had Draco, and I suspect you, four years later. After many more painful tries. I admit it, I became… Paranoid. Lucius, Morgana bless his wand, did his best to appease me and my worries. We had lost so many… I became very protective. It’s customary to keep the birth of a child restricted to familial relatives until they reach age one, you see. On their first birthday, a proclamation is sent out to the public at large. We have laws that no news of children below the age of five, unless in dire circumstances such as orphan-hood or war, can be published by the press. The proclamation of birth is the first declaration of a new family member to those outside the household. Tradition that stemmed from conflict in our world where children became objectives in blood feuds between rival families.”

Oh, if only Lily and James Potter had continued tradition…

Everything would be different.

However, Lily Evans had been Muggleborn, and as bright as she had reportedly been, it was always important to remember that. Not for bigotry, an insult, but because to so many Muggleborns, Pureblood tradition was merely seen as superstition. Outdated and needing a revise. Which, Ironically, this blind ignorance to their ways, the way their world worked, was the exact same complaint Muggleborns used against Purebloods.

Hogwarts had Muggle studies.

There was no equivalent for Pureblood protocol.

No, because that, of course, would be seen as forcing Muggleborn conformism.

Oppression. 

Perhaps, in a way, it was, but that didn’t mean nothing should be done for the chasm that was ripping their world apart greater and greater each day.

They did not see, nor did they inform themselves, on why or how these traditions first began. Declaring a new child to the world, in a time of immense conflict as it had been for Lily and James, had implored disaster. For the Longbottoms too. That is why, in 1981, a time where many pureblood families would normally send out a proclamation of birth, they had faced a rather strange baby boom the previous year, most had held off until the war was over.

Narcissa and Lucius had been such a pair.

Only, Narcissa had taken it a step further.

“When Draco reached a year and a half old, after only telling my sister, Severus and Dolohov of his birth, all I had sworn to secrecy… I wrote out the Proclamation. I was going to send it out. I truly was… But then I got to our owlery and… I remembered little Armond and his sunshine smile and… He was only four-… The Potters had barely fallen three months prior… Their child attacked in the crib and… I burnt the letter in the hearth. I promised Lucius I would send it out the week next, but the next week came and the letter was never sent.”

A sniff and a shuffle muffled by wood.

“You were scared Draco would go like Armond. That your family could be attacked in retaliation to my parents deaths.”

Though she could not see her, Narcissa nodded, a little stung by the child’s assertion of _my_ parents.

_Time._

They both needed time in their own ways.

Narcissa was exceptionally persistent.

She could wait.

It would make that moment, for it had to come, of being called mother all the purer.

“I was afraid of many things, sweet girl. So many things… Infection, retaliation, disease, a wayward spell cast his way… So many things could go wrong and I… I only wanted to protect my son… Protect _you_ , of that I am absolute. I never sent the announcement out. _Never_. I would yell and scream and… I was dreadful to Lucius, if he so much as mentioned it.”

Narcissa chuckled, and it was dry and wry like crunching autumn leaves. Merlin, she felt as if she was passing through the seasons, one sentence at a time.

“The proclamation was sent out by a reporter when Draco was aged three. I took him to see the Griffins in the stables out back. I didn’t know Lucius had guests around. Someone who was visiting must have saw a small Malfoy child and… News broke the next day. Secret Heir! It decreed. It caused quite the scandal.”

Silence.

A sudden spark in the dark.

“If this is… _True_.”

The girl stressed the word, strained and stretched even with it merely thought of as a suggestion.

“If I really am… If I was two when I was taken-… No one would have noticed. No one knew I was alive. The few who did know either got their mind erased, or were locked up in Azkaban weeks after my parents… My…”

Only She and Lucius, the Malfoy Healers who had saw to her birthing bed, Severus, Bellatrix, Dolohov, and perhaps Rodolphus and his brother, would have known of the child’s existence, as only they knew of Draco’s until he was three. His twin, for she had to be, she matched his age, the diagnosis spells Severus had used told them her age hadn’t been tampered with, would have been the same.

Dumbledore, however he had discovered her children, had an easy time of removing the girls already reduced existence in the public sphere. Seven people and a few records…

Narcissa had done that. She had made it simple for him. Easy. 

“We noticed, sweet girl. The spells used… They are complex magic, but _not_ infallible. I think we’ve always known… _Something_. Lucius has a set of rooms erected in his wing in the manor. Lively apartments. A playroom, a bedroom, everything… It used to rile Draco. He wasn’t allowed in, despite all the toys inside. Lucius wouldn’t permit it. It’s the only time he has ever put his foot down and kept it down when it comes to our son. I always thought it was in honour of Armond, but his rooms were in the south wing, and… Well, the Sakura pink shade Lucius had spelled the walls always did confuse us. He would constantly tell me it just felt… Right. I thought it was simply his wish for a daughter, not the subconscious grief of-”

_The subconscious grief of missing one._

_Click._

The door opened.

Narcissa scrambled out the way as it scraped ajar.

She had been right, the girl had been sitting by the door, stooping on the floor, nestled into herself.

Face puffy and pink with tear tracks.

She had cried silently, not a whiff of it laced in her voice.

A talent not given by birth, quite the contrary, but by practice.

Narcissa’s heart broke.

“I’m a Potter… I don’t know how to _be_ anything else.”

She had only been in the wizarding world a year, and in that year, she had the weight of the world on her too young shoulders. The girl-who-lived, the savoir… So many expectant eyes resting upon her because of her name. Her name that was lie. That was the only way she had known of being a witch, by being a Potter. Lose one, and she feared she would lose it all.

Narcissa knew what that felt like.

Knew how low it could bare down upon your shoulders.

Narcissa opened her arms wide.

She said the one thing she had always wished her own parents had, but never did.

“I don’t want you to be anything else… Just you. Just _you.”_

Ultimately, Narcissa found the _right_ thing to say, as the girl plunged in, embracing. She was tiny and scrawny in all the wrong spots, and jagged in places both seen and unseen, and it was the best hug Narcissa had in years. She crushed her close to her chest.

They held each other.

Simply held each other for a long while.

The girl pulled away first.

“I still think you’ve all gone barmy.”

Narcissa chuckled noisily.

“I’ll tell you a secret…”

She leant in.

“I think we’ve all been a little bonkers all along.”

The girl beamed at her.

Gently, Narcissa dipped a hand into her pocket and produced the little vial. She held it out, emerald shimmering.

“Take it… Go on.”

The girl took it gingerly, like one would hold a viper, but Narcissa didn’t let go, as she fixed the small fingers around the glass, overlapping her own hands.

“It’s your choice. _Only_ your choice. It will always be _your_ choice.”

The girl cocked a taunting brow.

Even with the Potter colouring, Lucius seemed to bleed through the cracks. 

“And if I smashed it right now on the floor?”

Narcissa grinned.

“Then it’s smashed and that’s the end of that. I will not get Severus to brew a new one. However, I’m not going anywhere. I’m _not_ leaving. Potion or no potion, I am here, come what may.”

The girl gazed down to their joined hands.

“And if I take it and nothing happens? If this is all some… Mistake?”

Narcissa squeezed back. 

“Potion or no potion, Potter or no Potter, you can’t get rid of me that easily. Not now, and I suspect, not ever.”

And that was the truth.

The girl, even if, somehow, this was all wrong… Narcissa _felt_ for the girl. She would be there, for her, come what may.

The girl pulled her hands away and stood, as Narcissa joined her.

She turned the vial around in her hands, wearily eyeing it before, slowly, she popped the cork.

Lucius Malfoy and Severus Snape made their way down the snaking halls of Saint Mungo’s to the upper floor, where Narcissa and Lyra would be, hopefully, doing a better job than Lucius had.

“I don’t understand why they kept the body at her aunt and uncles. A smart move would be to dispose of it completely. Obliterate any chance of discovery from the planet.”

Severus droned at his side, his dragonhide boots clacking on the tile like the tick-tock of an old grandfather clock.

“The blood protection wards…”

Lucius frowned.

“What?”

Severus sighed.

“That night when Voldemort attacked the Potters, Lily-“

Even after all this time, Severus said her name like a prayer, similarly pained, hopeless and reverential.

“Lily inadvertently enacted archaic magic. The old hearth kind. Her sacrifice laid a protective shield on her child, but it needed to be kept close to Lily’s blood to remain working. My best estimate is the magic was still active on the… The remains of the child. Keeping it close to her relatives kept the wards running in Little Whinging. It might have yet seeped over to Lyra herself, further hardening her concealment.”

Severus cut a brief glance to Lucius, before his gaze drew back to ahead of them. That was Severus, Lucius thought. Forever looking ahead because he could never fully look backwards for the agony of it. Lucius envied him greatly for this. His skill at disengaging his past from his present, as if they, as people, weren’t always plagued by what ifs, phantoms and what could have been’s.

“Voldemort didn’t kill the Potter child. Not only was the child too old at the time of her death, Voldemort had fallen months prior, but the blood ward protection was specifically against _him_. If he did survive the strike on the Potters, he wouldn’t have been able to touch a hair on her head until she became of age. Others however, such as a muggle aunt and uncle, wouldn’t have been affected.”

Lucius stalled, forcing Severus to backpedal a step or two, as he, swiftly, cast a muffliato.

Dolohov had said it, after all.

There were ears listening _everywhere_.

And maybe, just maybe, he did it so no one else but his oldest friend could hear the vulnerability in his voice.

“This is a mess, Sev. A real mess. How can I protect Lyra if I can’t even get the contract from the Department of Magical Bonds?”

Severus grinned, perpetually amused when he knew something others didn’t.

“Oh, you can’t get it, neither can Tom… But there _is_ someone.”

Lucius slanted a pale brow high, and, thank all, Severus didn’t keep him waiting long.

“The warding on the contract needs confirmation of presence. Blood is the easiest method to use, but it is not the only one. If Dolohov is correct, if Lyra is a Parselmouth, she has the verification right there.”

Lucius chortled.

“All the warding will detect is Parselmouth, and as such a rare ability, one only found in Salazar’s line, it will take it as Tom being present. Lyra can get the contract herself.”

Severus concurred, and the two began marching again, but that smile lazily dimmed to a gloomy glower.

“Why would Narcissa choose Tom? It would directly smear a mark on the child’s back for Dumbledore to attack.”

Lucius shrugged, the tempo of his cane hitting the floor matching Severus’s boots.

“Why did Tom attack the Potters?”

Severus scowled deeply, but Lucius waved a hand, flapping his argument away before it could come.

“Come on, Sev, even you have to know how out of character that was for him. Tom never put much stock in divination. No sane wizard does. Most, if not all, prophecies are self-fulfilling. As soon as you hear it, start fearing it, the quicker it becomes truth. Yet, suddenly he became fixated with one? A prophecy you just so overheard, only in _part_ , might I add, just in time to hand over to Tom, as he was swiftly gaining ground in the Ministry, when Dumbledore asked you for tea? You cannot convince me this was chance at play.”

Lucius scorned.

“Even so, if Tom did become preoccupied, for whatever reason, if it truly was all sheer luck up until that point… Have you ever known him to be so rash as to outrightly assault a family on word of mouth from a could-be-prophecy? Oh, he trusted you alright, as far as he trusted anyone, but he wasn’t stupid enough to only take your word for something so instrumental to the cause. For Merlin's sake, my man, for a long while it was a tossup between the Potters and Longbottoms for the child described. The Longbottoms were only attacked _after_ Tom had fallen, by a vengeful Bellatrix. None of it, not a lick, adds up, and even you can’t deny that arithmancy.”

Severus scoffed.

“Perhaps you’re conferring your bias of prophecy and divination onto him. For, to you, not even destiny can tell a Malfoy to do something he or she doesn’t wish to do. Tom, however, was also exceedingly conceited, if you have forgotten.”

Lucius met his friends stare and held it.

“He had abundant reason to be.”

Severus, ordinarily so combative on principle, didn’t, and couldn’t, dispute this. No one, apart from Albus, had been on Tom’s level of magical prowess, and Albus Dumbledore had a good forty-four years on the man. 

Nevertheless, their speculation, because currently speculation was _all_ they could do, was cut short for they reached the chamber door housing Lucius's wife and daughter.

Again, as Severus opened the door after a sharp, rapping knock, Lucius was struck silly with the thought. He genuinely, honestly did have a daughter.

And there she was, _Lyra_ , for he refused to think of the girl as Harriet any longer, standing next to his wife by the lavatory, his wife who was smiling so brightly, and-

He watched as she tipped her had back and downed the cure.

Hush.

Stillness.

More stillness.

Further…

Nothing happened.

Lucius glanced to Severus, who was frowning at the girl.

So… Something was meant to have happened by now, then?

Had all this been… Wrong?

Did he not have a daughter and-

The girl smiled brilliantly.

“See! All a mistake. I feel fine and-“

She rinsed white unexpectedly and, suddenly, bent over, throwing up all over his wife’s robes and shoes.

Burgundy against the juniper green, and gleaming and-

_Blood._

Lyra had thrown up blood.

Blood tainted black by dark magic.

Narcissa gasped and leapt for the girl as she began falling, shaking-

_Seizing._

Eyes rolling to the back of her skull.

Narcissa peered over, frantic.

“Severus, Lucius, help!”

The dour man sprinted over, wide eyed, trying to get a hold of the seizing girl, wand out. Lucius stood stock still, in alarm, as Severus scanned her.

“Fuck. Dark curse… He hid a dark curse underneath… Narcissa, get her to the bed. We have five minutes at most. Lucius, I need Mandrake root, Dittany, aconite and a unicorn hair. They should be in the store cupboard outside… Lucius, _now_!”

Lucius ran.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NEXT CHAPTER PREVIEW:
> 
> Harriet awoke to immense agony and, possibly, the worst sight anyone could awake to on this green, green earth.
> 
> Draco Malfoy grinning at the bottom of her bed.
> 
> "You look a lot more like father than I do. Everyone says I resemble mother. It's the eyes I think. Silver rather than-"
> 
> On instinct, which it very much was for Harriet when it came to Malfoy, and more than a bit dazed and crazed by the sudden pain she was in, not quite remembering how or why she had got here, in this silken four poster bed in a brightly lit airy room the soft shade of veiled pink, her leg lashed out and connected with his face.
> 
> He landed on his arse with a thud, hand shooting to his nose, cursing muffled by his hand.
> 
> "Bloody hell, Lyra! What was that for! Looking like father isn't all that bad! All mother's friends say how handsome he is! Pay a girl a compliment, and she punts you in the head!"
> 
> xXx
> 
> The smell of clove draped about the pub like a shroud of musk and spice. It irritated Severus's nose to no end. He crept up to the man sitting at the bar, back to the patrons. Certainly, he knew Severus was there already. He would have smelled him a mile off.
> 
> "I didn't expect for it to be you to hunt me down after all this time."
> 
> Severus sneered at the patchwork back of the man's shabby blazer.
> 
> "Trust me, if this was not entirely necessary, I would never sink to such desperate needs. But that is what this is. Desperate needs for desperate times."
> 
> The man downed the last of his firewhisky before swivelling to face Severus.
> 
> "Now isn't that precious, coming from a Deatheater. A lecture on despair. You lot are good at dishing that out, aren't you? Not so much at taking it. Tell me then, what has brought the almighty Severus Snape entreating at a werewolf's table?"
> 
> Severus scoffed.
> 
> "The death of Harriet Potter and the freedom of your wrongly convicted friend, Lupin. Or would I be mistaken, Deatheater or not, that you would wish to aid in this endeavor for vengeance and justice?"
> 
> Remus Lupin's gaze flashed amber in the dim candlelight.
> 
> "Speak swiftly. Now."


	4. The Girl Through The Window - Part I

Harriet awoke to immense agony, the kind that lanced razor-sharp pain through her head and triggered colourful spots of light to flash in front of her eyes, and, possibly, the worst sight anyone could awake to on this green, green earth, peering at her through the smudges of rainbow light.

Draco Malfoy grinning at the bottom of her bed.

“You look a lot more like father than I do. Everyone says I resemble mother. It’s the eyes I think. Silver rather than-“

On instinct, which it very much was for Harriet when it came to Malfoy, and more than a bit dazed and crazed by the sudden pain she was in, not quite remembering how or why she had got here, in this silken four poster bed in a brightly lit airy room the soft shade of veiled pink, her leg lashed out and connected with his head.

She deeply regretted the sudden movement immediately. Not because Draco landed on his arse with a thud, hand shooting to his nose, cursing muffled by his hand. No, that, she thought, had been the best part of her week, but because the pain crested in her chest. _Everywhere_. A precipitous tide crashing. It felt like her entire body had been bludgeoned, every effort, a twitch or a tremble, sending hot swells of ache to muscle and bone and sinew.

“Bloody hell, Lyra! What was that for! Looking like father isn’t all that bad! All mother’s friends say how handsome he is! Pay a girl a compliment, and she punts you in the head!”

Harriet ignored Draco’s rather extravagant ire, as she ignored her pain. It was easy to do, if you knew how to bury yourself _into_ yourself. Fold until only a tiny ball existed. Years of abuse had given her resilience, if nothing else.

Instead, she scuttled out the bed, rolling, over to the other side, far away from the Slytherin boy. She fell out of the comfortable bed and into a heap on the hardwood floor. It took her three attempts to try and stand, to heave herself up, leaning heavily on the bed-frame. Her limbs felt odd. Strange. Stretched. As if they didn’t really belong to her, and each step, each reach, was a negotiation rather than an order.

Her knees knocked together as she stood, skin smacking skin, shaking from the strain of holding her upright. Everything hurt. From toenail to hair strand. Everything felt _wrong_. No. Not wrong… Changed. She glanced down, patted hand to chest and stomach, but all she could see was a dress, white, a night gown really, one that trailed to her ankles and wrists, that, strangely, looked to be straight out of Victorian England.

Someone must have changed her clothes.

She wanted the old ones back.

She wanted them back right _now._

Perhaps if she had her old clothes, she’d feel…

She would feel like herself again.

“Get away from me or… Or… Or…”

There it was. Something else wrong, different, not quite right. Her voice. It sounded strange, even to her own ears. Husky from pain, but… Clearer. Lighter. She remembered the other voice then, cultured, ringing like crystal… Where had she heard that voice? Where-

Draco came to a tottering stand on the other side of the bed, gently prodding his flushed pink nose. There was no blood, nothing had been broken, but he did hiss at the delicate contact, glowering at her accusingly.

“Or _what_ exactly? You look like you can barely stand upright, let alone raise your wand.”

Her gaze darted behind him. There was only one door in this huge ornate room, just one exit, and Draco, _of bloody course_ , was standing in her way. In her current state, there was no way she could make it past him before he could… Well, do whatever nefarious thing that had brought him here in the first place.

The bay window by the bed was a no-go too. She didn’t have her wand, she couldn’t summon her broom, and from the view she _could_ see, they were a good three stories up from the earth, the ground outside a sprawling field of flowers. 

There was nowhere to run.

No where to hide.

In such a case, Harriet fell back onto what she did best, as she scowled back to the boy over the hill of velvet blankets parting them.

Talking game to scare off the bigger predator.

“I don’t need my wand to put you out of your misery, Malfoy. One good hit to that frail neck of yours and it’ll snap like a twig under your big head. I’ll bury you underneath the flower patch out back.”

She expected Draco to puff out as he normally did, preen and strut like a peacock. Perhaps he would even tell her ‘My father will hear about this!’

Yet, he only smiled and laughed.

Honestly, it jarred her to see the normally guarded, circumspect face of Malfoy so… So _open_.

Maybe this was all a dream-

_A nightmare._

A nightmare she needed to wake up from _right now._

A nightmare where her body felt weird, and she had big comfy beds, and people called her Lyra, and Malfoy _smiled_ at her, and-

“Now that’s more like it, Lyra. However, a true Malfoy threat would go further. Something along the lines of… I’ll bury you underneath the flower patch outback and then make a wine that I’ll serve to your mother on the anniversary of your death. See? You need the _flare_.”

She shook her head. The white silk ribbons at her chest fluttered.

“Well it’s a good thing I’m not-“

The nightdress didn’t have ribbons. Notably ones that curled like that. They weren’t there when she glanced down earlier. Anew, she peeked down.

No.

Not ribbons.

_Hair._

Curly white hair, as pale as moonlight. Curly white hair, as pale as moonlight… That pulled from her own head.

That was _her_ hair.

The rather vicious tug to a lock and the pop of pain on her scalp proved as much.

That was her-

_Oh. Yes. The chess game… The Potion… The pain…_

She lifted one up before her eyes, a blond that could only ever belong to a Malfoy, a spiral a lot freer than what she had previously.

The potion had worked.

It had-

It had _worked._

She was…. She was a…

She let it fall through her fingers like the ground had suddenly fallen out from beneath her feet. 

Draco’s smug smile fell with the earth too.

_Everything dropped._

“You… You didn't remember, did you?”

Two days after seeing the Malfoy’s home with a hurt, but very much _alive_ , child, saw Severus Snape prowling down Diagon Alley at dusk. He turned the corner, skulking down towards the more… dubious establishments at the end of the meandering path. They said there was no rest for the wicked, and no peace for the good. Severus Snape, for all it said about him, neither had rest or peace.

He suspected he never would.

Especially now. 

Hogwarts school of witchcraft and wizardry would open its gates once more in four weeks’ time. That was the time-frame he was working with. Twenty-eight days to get safeguards in place, not only for Lyra, but for them _all_.

Severus, as observant as he was, would keep an eye out during the school year, but even he couldn’t have eyes everywhere. Chiefly if he, too, wanted to be inconspicuous and not raise any unwanted due attention.

In short, they needed help.

As much help as they could garner.

A hand.

A hand that Dumbledore himself would accept and not think twice on. Perhaps a hand to fill in the newly vacant Defence Against the Dark Arts position, where they could observe where Snape could not.

The smell of clove draped about the pub like a shroud of musk and spice. The charmed bell above the door chiming upon his entry. It irritated Severus’s nose to no end. He crept up to the man sitting at the bar, back to the patrons. Certainly, he knew Severus was there already. He would have smelled him a mile off, even through the smoke.

“I didn’t expect for it to be _you_ to hunt me down.”

Severus sneered at the patchwork back of the man’s shabby blazer.

“Trust me, if this was not entirely necessary, I would never sink to such desperate needs. But that _is_ what this is. Desperate needs for desperate times.”

The man downed the last of his firewhisky before swivelling to face Severus.

“Now isn’t that precious, coming from a Deatheater. A lecture on desperation. Tell me then, what has brought the almighty Severus Snape entreating at a werewolf’s dinner table?”

Severus scoffed.

“The death of Harriet Potter and the freedom of your wrongly convicted friend, Lupin. Or would I be mistaken, Deatheater or not, that you would wish to aid in this endeavour for vengeance and justice?”

Remus Lupin’s gaze flashed amber in the dim candlelight.

“Speak swiftly. Now.”

“Zabini is going to be _so_ jealous when I tell him when we go back to Hogwarts. He’s always wanted a sibling, but his mother is worried about her ‘waistline’, whatever that means. Nott too. He has a younger brother already, but all he does is drool on you. Positively revolting, if you ask me. I think once you get resorted and-”

Harriet could not focus on the posturing of one Draco Malfoy as she stood at far end of the ornate room she had awoken in. Instead, she could only stare at the… Thing through the window.

A thing that looked to be a little girl

Twelve, like her.

But _not_ her.

That thing could _never_ be her.

It looked too much like Draco Malfoy, pointed chin, hair a disturbingly lurid white, so pale it was bordering on sickening, as if someone had shocked all the colour from them. Nevertheless, Malfoy, as it happened once a blue moon, was right.

The girl looked an awful lot like his imposing father, from the small glimpse Harriet had gotten from departing from the Hogwarts express last year. The white hair was more pale moonlight than Narcissa’s crisp snow fall. The eyes the shade of an oncoming storm rolling on a horizon, rather than a knife glinting in the dark. 

Draco, like his mother, and the Blacks before them, were all English aristocratic grace. Proud and blue blooded.

Malfoy Senior, however, and the girl through the window, was all Dauphin lithe and soft in a way Marquis’s and Viscounts were.

It seemed you could take the wizarding nobility out of France, but you couldn’t take the French poise from the wizarding nobility, even if they had been on English shores for the last five hundred odd years.

And Harriet hated Malfoy Senior for it, despite only ever catching a passing glance of the striking figure standing, cane in hand, on platform 9 3/4.

Like she hated the girl through the window.

Because it wasn’t a window, no matter how much she told herself it was.

It was a mirror, gilt framed, above the vanity.

That wasn’t another little girl, it was a reflection, cocking its head as she did, blinking when she did, scowling as she scowled, echoing back everything Harriet did not want to see. 

That _was_ a mirror.

That _was_ her.

Circe, that was her and-

She didn’t feel sick as she expected she would. Or faint. Or even angry. There was a sudden… Disconnect. A plug in her brain frying its fuse as her thoughts sparked out. An out of body viewing. A fleeting and frosty ‘so… This is happening’, kind of thing that left Harriet feeling wholly barren. 

It was the way she normally felt when Petunia drew her arm back.

Or when Vernon became that particularly ugly tint of red in the face, before his fists balled.

A knowing of oncoming disaster not possible to divert, a bracing of feet. _Take the blow, and it will all be over soon_. _Go deep inside, somewhere no one can reach, and you won’t feel the bruises till morn_.

The blow, here, came when the words being spoken to her registered.

Draco was leaning against the wall beside the mirror, coolly calm, as if everything wasn’t utterly wrong and erroneous, propped by his elbow as he inspected his already perfectly manicured hand. He was doing, as Harriet had done, what he did best.

Prattling.

_Resorted._

Her head snapped around so fast the flashing lights came back to her vision, stinging in multi-coloured.

“What do you mean ‘resorting’? What resorting?”

Draco cocked a pale brow at her.

She wanted to rip it right off his face.

She wanted her old clothes back.

She wanted her messy black hair, and her green eyes, and even the hideous scar on her forehead and-

She wanted everything to go back to what it had been before, where everything made sense. Where she looked like a Potter, and Malfoy was a prat, and she would be far from here, and this confusing mirror.

“The house resorting? Father’s already applied for it due to extenuating circumstances. I… _Overheard_ him in his study floo calling the parental board this morning before I came here and you so delicately assaulted me.”

Harriet scoffed.

“You mean you _spied_ on your own father.”

Draco sincerely appeared confused at her sarcastic tone.

“Of course I did. You learn the most when people _don’t_ think you’re listening in.”

Harriet shook her head. Her stomach rolled as, from the corner of her eye, she saw the mirror-not-mirror girl do the same.

Only, it was white hair that fluttered about slim shoulders.

Only, it was so very, very wrong.

“It doesn’t matter. I don’t need a resorting. I’m a Gryffindor. No one-“

“Just like you’re a Potter, yes?”

Her hand balled into a fist at her side.

It was indelicate.

Cruel, in a sardonic sense.

Completely a Malfoy thing to say.

Yet… _Yet_.

It snapped something inside her. It hurt, and it pierced, and something in her chest wept, but, strangely, so very strangely, it was exactly what she needed to hear to bring her careening back to her body from that far off place she had buried herself.

She wasn’t a Potter.

The potion had worked.

Her reflection showed that much.

Draco pushed away from the wall, dared a step closer to her, brave for him and her already clenched fist he could clearly see, his voice dropping down soft, low and gentle in a way she had never heard the normally cruel boy speak.

“Look, the magic used on you was strong, or at least that is what father said. Strong enough to trounce all warding, detection and diagnosis spells. It’s a given it also affected your sorting last year. Worse case scenario, you sit and get sorted and you’re put back into Gryffindor. If not, then Gryffindor isn’t where you’re truly meant to be. It’s a win-win.”

_No_. No it wasn’t. Because Draco, like everybody else, didn’t know how hard it was for her last year to argue the hat into putting her into Gryffindor. Gryffindor with her friends, Hermione and Ron, and the twins and-

The bloody hat would put her in Slytherin. She knew it would as she knew the sun was going to set this evening. It would put her in Slytherin, and she would have to spend her days sitting next to Pansy, listening about new dress robes and beauty potions and-

Ron and Hermione would never speak to her again. The Weasleys-

Merlin, the Weasleys! They hated Malfoys. _Loathed_ them. She was-… Harriet-…. They would never-

Would she lose everything? Her name… Her house…

Draco shifted uncomfortably. Face a little stricken.

“Merlin, are you… Are you _crying_?”

He sounded desperate and out of place. Finally unsure of himself. In any other circumstance, Harriet would have found it hilarious. She had finally brought the almighty Malfoy heir down a peg, unbalanced his normally cool façade.

“Sod off, Malfoy!”

Draco, panicked by the wet tone of her voice, glanced to the door as if he might bolt. Mordred, she was a mess, wasn’t she? First she had kicked him, now she was crying, and, as a single child herself, who apparently wasn’t such an only child as originally thought, she didn’t blame him for his momentary flight plan.

Merlin knew what she would have done if Malfoy appeared in her cupboard, black haired, _crying,_ suddenly a Potter, suddenly a _brother,_ and-

She had a brother.

She had a mother.

And a father.

All alive.

All here and-

Draco grinned at her, evidently striving to lighten the mood.

It didn’t work.

“You know, that doesn’t work anymore, right? You’re a Malfoy too.”

The blond boy most likely couldn’t realise being told you were a Malfoy wasn’t some sort of big lottery win.

This time she _did_ start crying, and Draco stepped closer, clumsily patting her shoulder as if she was a feral cat.

“Come on now, don’t cry. It’s not all bad. You’ll see-“

“You’re bollocks at this. Absolutely rubbish.”

Draco brightened up, pulling back only to hold up a finger.

“Ah, but I know what will help! Follow me.”

He dashed for the bedroom door as Harriet called after him.

“You said Lucius said I couldn’t go out yet, as I’m not-“

He glanced back over his shoulder, frowning.

“Haven’t you ever heard of _sneaking_? I know the Harriet who went out after curfew, and turned headfirst to fight a troll has, and _is_ in there somewhere. Only the covering has changed. Come on, where’s that Gryffindor brashness you’re renowned for? This is no fun if you’re… You’re _Longbottom_ all of a sudden.”

Immediately, she wanted to defend Neville.

His name wasn’t some insult to be used for cowardice or timidity.

But she didn’t.

Because beneath the barb, there was something nice hidden, and, she thought, that was the real point Draco had been struggling to deliver, beneath the Slytherin affronts. Something finally said and done right.

It reminded Harriet that, no, she had _not_ lost everything.

She was still _her._

Blond and pale or not.

And Harriet didn’t shy away from a battle.

She didn’t cry and weep about her lot in life.

She pushed on.

Pushed on and kept her head held tall.

Tentatively, she trailed Draco out the bedroom door.

“You should take the skull to Gringotts. Give it to the Goblins. They’ll close any vault relating back to the Potter’s and cut off a big source of income for… For _whoever_ did this. The goblins will owe you a great debt for bringing this matter to their attention. One they will be honour bound to uphold later. Having them on side will come in useful.”

Remus stated as he and Severus accosted a small table in the back of the pub. He, unlike Severus, did not believe, or could not believe, Dumbledore had, in some capacity, been involved in this, despite the blaring proof. Of course he couldn’t.

Nevertheless, now was not the time to argue allegiances.

_Not quite yet._

Severus eyed the tired man over the rim of his own glass of firewhisky.

“And will you come this spring? Apply for the defence position?”

Remus glared darkly at him, offended.

“Of course I will, though I doubt they’ll give it to a werewolf like me. However, I’ll try. The child might not be… She’s just a child. I’ll watch over her.”

Snape leered.

“Where has this loving sentimentality been hiding? This could have all been easily diverted if you had bothered to visit the girl years ago, act as a friend of her parents was _supposed_ to act and-“

Remus cut over him sharply.

“As equally diverted if you ever visited the child in Little Whinging, yourself. Don’t try and lay all the blame on me, Snape. We’ve _all_ failed.”

And that was the dreadful truth. In one way or another, they had _all_ failed abysmally, and Lily’s daughter, her real daughter, had paid the price, and a Malfoy, the child of Severus’s dearest friend, had been abused for years.

Snape wasn’t really mocking Remus as he was disparaging himself too.

Silence fell around them, and, oddly, it was the typically ascetic Remus who broke it.

“I was… I wasn’t there at the end.”

Snape glanced up, mute, letting the reserved man get his piece in.

“I was on a mission for the Order. I hadn’t seen or spoken to Lily and James for months before they… Before they were slain. I’ll never forgive myself for that.”

Snape swirled his glass, watched the amber liquid lap at the crystal sides.

“Yes, you were infiltrating Fenrir’s pack, weren’t you?”

Remus briskly glanced up, meeting Severus’s dark gaze.

_This_ brought a crooked smile to his face. 

“Don’t look so surprised, Lupin. Did you really think Voldemort didn’t know what you were doing? That Albus had placed you there for intel? It took Greyback a full six hours in a private meeting with the Dark Lord to convince him not to have you executed on sight. Fenrir believed he could convert you… Did he?”

Remus didn’t answer for a long while.

Severus didn’t blame the man.

If anyone else knew what divided loyalties were like, it was he.

_It was he._

“Dumbledore began distancing me two months into my placement. Slowly, I received less updates from the Order… By the end, I wasn’t allowed into certain meetings. I… I will say this and _only_ this. Dumbledore had… Reason to isolate me as he did.”

Remus took a sharp inhale of breath, so sharp it came as a hiss.

“Werewolves aren’t meant for this solitary life. We’re pack creatures by nature. Without Lily, James, Peter and Sirius at my side I… The freedom and community Fenrir offered was tempting. Very tempting for twenty-year old me.”

Snape took a lingering sip, felt the burn of truth and alcohol mix obnoxiously between his teeth.

“We’re a lot alike, Lupin. Whether either of us want to admit it or not. We both had binds to both sides. Ties that led us to trying to straddle the gulf between those we love. Our indecision has caused only loss.”

He met Remus’s eye.

“War is coming, Lupin.”

Severus’s glass clinked on the wood as he placed it down.

“I can feel it in the air. The tension… It feels as it did a decade ago. War _is_ coming, and this time, neither of us can balance the two sides. It’s one or the other.”

Old hands going through old dances. They both knew the tune ringing in the air. War was coming, they knew. As it had twelve years ago. Both men, however, where wiser than their younger counterparts, experienced in loss and grief and conflict. 

They weren’t the same naive boys they used to be, because, even at twenty, that was all they had been. Boys fighting a man’s war. So arrogant, so sure they would come out the other side unscathed.

_Unchanged._

If only they knew…

“It does feel like it, doesn’t it?”

It was not an outright yes from Remus, but neither was it a no. They had both learned not to sign over their souls so easily anymore.

Remus downed the rest of his drink, slamming the glass back down with a clack that threatened to shatter the glass in his grip.

“You help me get Sirius out of Azkaban as you’ve promised… You have my wand. Whoever has done this, to Lily, to James, to little Harriet and Lyra, innocent children… Dumbledore or not, I will tear their head clean off.” 

Snape nodded.

“Willing to turn your word into an oath?”

Remus, for the first time that evening, smiled at him. Wolfish. Keen. He lifted the hand that had been resting on his hip, the polished wood in his palm gleaming in the candlelight, showing Snape he already had his wand out.

Likely had it aimed at him the entire conversation, should it have drifted southward fast.

“The years must have been kind to you, because you’re losing your touch Snape. I’m already ahead of you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NEXT CHAPTER: An unwelcome visitor comes knocking at Malfoy Manor, Lucius has a momentary heart attack when he finds Lyra's bed empty, and Lyra gets a small gift from a very strange creature...
> 
> A.N: This was originally meant to be a part of next chapter, but together they were just too big for one single chapter, and I had to split the two apart. Good news though, as this means all of next chapter is already written up, just needing a little bit of fine tuning, and should be Posted Wednesday. I hope you all enjoyed this chapter, and look forward to the next!


	5. Between The Crystal Light

Malfoy Manor was finer, greater, and more striking than anything Harriet had ever seen before. The floors were marbled and carpeted in lavish rugs, the woods used dark and decadent, and chandeliers gleamed above their heads, floating by magic, extravagant prisms of crystal light sparkling.

Harriet was almost transfixed by that refracted light as she and Draco scarpered down the winding halls, through the labyrinth, down the stairs and into the opening foyer.

It was also, Draco insisted with resolve that must have been asserted upon himself as a boy, _not_ a Manor at all, despite what the English named it. He called it the Chateau du Malfoy, in a very sudden clear and crisp French accent, shifting the y to an I at the end. Harriet refrained from pointing out the obvious. That he, despite the French surname, was English too.

Yet, she couldn’t begrudge him his pride.

If she lived here, she would be proud too.

Of course, she wouldn’t have been a complete prick about it like Draco sometimes was, looking down his nose at those he deemed substandard.

Nevertheless, she never knew people could live like this.

In such regalia, such decadence, such… History.

And it was that history that snared Harriet and didn’t let go.

Little Harriet, who had nothing of her family, or the family she _thought_ she had, not so much as a picture or a loose button from a blouse.

Just the whispers of a dying woman’s scream, which, as it turns out, might not be her own memory at all.

However, every corner of Malfoy Manor reeked of their past. Old fleur-de-lis in bulwarks, great-grandfathers smooching great-grandmother’s in their portraits, and one peculiar rusted axe above one of the many mantels that Draco swore belonged to their second-married, great, great, great uncle Marius Malfoy who had, with that very axe, beheaded a Mountain Troll and saved his soon to be wife, Amreli Selwyn.

_That_ tale sat uneasily.

It appeared Troll scrapping was in Malfoy blood.

Malfoy blood that ran through her-

It keenly reminded Harriet that she wasn’t on a tour, and this was _Malfoy_ , and that might be a bit prejudiced, but a year of animosity does _not_ simply vanish, and she _too_ was a Malfoy, and the window was not a window but a mirror, and suddenly, she was dizzy all over again, suddenly, she was sick and-

She must have grown pale, staring wide eyed at that axe, or alarmingly red, it was hard to tell through trying to swallow down the bile rising and burning her throat, because Draco seemed to notice and tried to usher her from the room.

They got to the doorway before Harriet reached out, wrapped a hand around the fine collar of his shirt, and wrenched him back.

He flailed like a fish. Floundering and burbling.

“Ow! Will you stop attacking me when I’m only-“

Hastily, she brought a finger to her lips, her voice more a hiss than a murmur.

“Shhhh!”

She dipped around an indignant Draco to pull the door closed, only leaving a crack to peep through.

“Someone’s coming.”

Draco appeared eager to argue before he, too, heard the tell-tale thumping of steps. Six beats… Three people.

One of them dragged their left foot.

Draco pushed in closer, crowding at her back, so he too could stoop and spy through their little peephole.

Lucius Malfoy was the first to come around the bend and enter the grand foyer outside the door. He looked… Well, Harriet thought, he looked positively _exhausted_. His fine clothes were wrinkled, as if he had fallen asleep in a chair, and his long blonde hair was mussed, free, tangled at his shoulders.

He looked nothing like the man she had seen on platform 9 ¾. That striking man of sharp lines, feline grace, and sumptuous attire used as armour.

Here, he looked… Human.

Human and not alone.

Albus Dumbledore stood three paces behind, in periwinkle robes that brought a smile to Harriet’s face at the familiarity. Another man was beside him, in drab office robes, fiddling with his tie and briefcase. Harriet glanced behind her.

“Who is that?”

She mouthed. Draco, of course, rolled his pale eyes at her and hissed back.

“You really do know nothing, don’t you? That’s the Minister of Magic, Cornelius Fudge. They must-”

She barely managed to slap a hand over his still moving mouth before the trio came ambling past their door, toward the main entrance and exit of Malfoy Manor.

The glare Draco shot her was nothing short of deadly.

However, as luck would have it, and Harriet thought she was a very lucky girl indeed, they paused just outside, close enough that she, and Draco, could hear their muted conversations spoken between the dancing fractions of crystal light.

The Slytherin at her back seemed to pick up on the gist, as her hand fell away, and he, wisely, chose to shut up.

“Are you sure you wish for Harriet to be resorted? She has made a lot of friends already. Given the circumstances, if we change too much for her she could-“

Lucius was quick in cutting Dumbledore off.

“Me and my wife are certain on this matter, Headmaster. As I have told you the last five times. We will also be taking _Lyra_ to get a new wand soon, as her Healers think she will not be able to use her old one due to the shift in her magical core. I am, however, surprised you came today. I do not remember inviting you to our meeting.”

Lucius’s back was to her, but Harriet could see Dumbledore smile.

The smile she so achingly adored.

Full of mysteries and secrets and grandfatherly affection.

But the shadows here, in Malfoy Manor, between the crystal light, were deep and dark, and that smile, that smile Harriet so loved looked… Sharp.

“The welfare of my students has and will always be my top priority, Lord Malfoy. As soon as I heard the terrible news, I knew I must offer my aid in this terrible time for you and your family. However, you have not been accepting visitors till this day, and the wards were up. It is a shame, as you have told me, Harriet is sleeping?”

Though she could not see his face, there was a roll of muscle between the blades of Lucius’s shoulders she could see rippling through the cotton shirt and silk waistcoat. The kind of suppressed reel that told of a man holding back a punch.

Uncle Vernon never had it, but then again, Uncle Vernon _never_ held back.

“The magic used on her nearly killed her two days ago. She is in no shape for visitors this soon.”

And that’s when it happened.

She could see through his spectacles, those half-moon shards of glass, as Dumbledore’s gaze dropped behind Lucius, to the door at his back, to the door _she_ was hiding behind.

“Yes, _sleeping_ , quite.” 

There was a moment, a lingering breath where he seemed to wait, eyes trained on the door, as if he could see through the wood and lacquer, right at Harriet crouching on marble, smiling the special smile. She thought, perhaps, he expected her to jump out, and dash to him.

And she felt the urge to.

She felt it tightening in her chest, wetting her palms with sweat, and cramping in her bunched legs.

She felt it so much it burned.

This was Albus Dumbledore. The man who could fix everything. The man who gave her lemon drops and grandfatherly smiles and pats on the head and… and…

And that smile, that bloody smile, was the same one that had saw her off back to the Dursley’s months prior. 

That same smile that knew exactly what she was going back to.

That same smile that, here, didn’t look so nice anymore.

So, she didn’t leap out like a Jack-in-the-box.

She didn’t run to the Headmaster.

She stayed squatting, in the shadows, burning.

She watched the smile on Dumbledore’s face disintegrate like ash, as if she was so hot she had burned him down too.

Cornelius clapped his hands together loudly, snapping the moment like one would snap a rubber band, and massaged his podgy fingers together.

“The welfare of Lyra is all _any_ of us want, dear friend. The records will be changed by the weeks end. Lyra will be recorded in the Ministry, among being a student at Hogwarts. She will be resorted when she goes back for her Second year, and we will see where the exploding cards may fall. Now, we must be off. We have a lot of work ahead of us, as do you Lord Malfoy. Give my kind regards to your son and daughter and, of course, your lovely wife.”

Dumbledore nodded and they began to walk away, out of sight, to the door she assumed, though Lucius stayed where he was, calling out to their retreating backs.

“I would advise against dropping in unannounced again, Headmaster. My wife and I are erecting the old Malfoy wards today. The first time they have been raised in over a century. Nasty things they are, to trespassers of _any_ kind. Make sure to send an owl next time, should you lose your head… Accidentally.”

Though she could not see him any longer through the crack in the door, she heard Dumbledore’s reply all the same.

“I will keep that in mind, Lord Malfoy. Send my best wishes to _Harriet_. Tell her I _will_ see her when she comes back to Hogwarts.” 

A threat or a promise, she couldn’t tell.

Yet, she _could_ tell when the doors closed behind the departing duo with a thud.

She could tell when they apparated away by the swell of magic in the air.

Lucius swore underneath his breath before he too was turning on his heels, marching back the way he came.

Silence settled once more.

Well, silence settled for the whole thirty seconds Draco managed to keep quite.

“I’m surprised you didn’t run out screaming how the nasty Slytherins had kidnapped you.”

He heckled as he stood again. She glanced down at herself.

Down at the white hair and white dress and pale skin and-

And she felt a bit of a ghost then. Pallid and dim. A ghost of someone she did not know. Someone she never _got_ to be. A life… Snatched away and thrown back into her lap.

“I am too.”

And that was the truth.

She would be lying if she said everything made sense because it didn’t. Not to her. It had all happened so fast. First she had been gardening and then… Then the avalanche came in the shape of a small child’s skull, and suddenly she was in a bed, a _real_ bed with warm blankets, and abruptly, she was a Malfoy and… and Dumbledore’s smile didn’t seem so nice anymore.

He had made one blunder.

Just one.

He called her Harriet.

He stressed it, pushed it, supplanted it and branded it about like the pirates with a cutlass from the old storybooks.

If it weren’t for Narcissa, perhaps it would not have unsettled her so. Narcissa who said she could be whoever or whatever she wanted to be, Potter or no Potter, just _her._

And no one, ever before, wanted _just_ her.

Albus Dumbledore wanted Harriet, not Lyra, and that wouldn’t change, change as she had, right in the heart.

_She wasn’t Harriet Potter._

It was the first time since awakening that she let herself think that fully. _She wasn’t Harriet Potter._ She said it again and again in her mind. _She wasn’t Harriet Potter._ And that… That was okay.

A name was a name, nothing more.

It didn’t dictate _who_ she was.

Her worth was not in six letters.

She was more than the name Potter.

She would always be more.

Her favourite flower was still a weed, dandelions, and she still loved treacle tarts and quidditch. She missed Hermione and Ron fiercely, perhaps the former a tad more than the latter. And they would still be her friends, if they would have her, because real friendship didn’t rest on a family name. Although Ron might huff and skulk for a week or two before he dragged his head out his arse, or Hermione did it for him. She was still the best in her class in Defence and Charms, and Draco still beat her in Herbology and Potions, and the world, despite it feeling like it had ended an hour ago, would keep spinning.

Perhaps things had changed. Perhaps she would be put in Slytherin. Perhaps she would need a new wand and maybe, just maybe, Draco wasn’t as big of a prat as she had first thought, but that…

That was life.

Life was change.

Life was growth.

She felt a hand on her shoulder.

She met Draco’s gaze. Moonlight against silver.

“We’ll make a snake out of you yet.”

It didn’t upset her as much as the thought of it had before.

Snake or Lion, Potter or not, she was worth more than other people’s labels.

Narcissa had taught her that. 

She wasn’t going to give that up.

Huffing, she stood, pushing the door wide open again and strolling through. She glanced back over her shoulder.

“You said you were going to show me something, unless it was just that rusty old axe?”

Draco grinned and the two children darted out into the hall.

“TWINKY!”

Lucius roared as he drew the blankets back.

The old House Elf, who was used to Lucius’s dramatics since she had watched him in the crib, though he did sound particularly distraught this time, popped into existence at the foot of the bed.

Lucius pointed to the ruffled, and _empty_ , mattress.

“Where is she? Where’s Lyra? What-“

_Dumbledore._

He had been here.

Unannounced.

Lucius knew what it had been. A show of power. _I can still reach you. Invade your home. Nowhere is safe._

Of course, he had done it under the pretense of checking up on a prized student, guarded by the presence of Fudge, but Lucius _knew._

You couldn’t become a politician as shrewd as he was without identifying an artful warning.

And now Lyra was missing, and Dumbledore had been here, and perhaps it wasn’t _just_ a show of force, but a diversion, for Lucius had watched him like a hawk, and perhaps that was what Dumbledore wanted. For Lucius to look forward, while at his back Dumbledore, or one of his ilk, crept in and stole his-

“She be in the kitchens, Master. She with-“

Lucius didn’t listen.

Panic made men deaf, he discovered.

He was gone from the room in a flash. Down the halls, winding, running, skidding on the tile outside the kitchens and-

Lucius Froze.

_Laughter._

_Children’s_ laughter.

He edged towards the door, wand still clasped in his trembling hand, peered in through the wide entrance, and felt a bolt of warmth searing in his chest.

The kitchens, normally immaculate, were a complete mess.

The lower drawers were open, food pulled out and never put back. A tower of stalls was precariously balanced near the pantry, tilting and leaning, a temporary ladder someone tiny must have used to climb to the top shelves. Someone had dropped a sack of flour near the sink, a Wingardium Leviosa gone wrong Lucius suspected, and, yes, two sets of footprints came scampering out, across the floor.

The culprits, covered in flour and what appeared to be broken, uncooked spaghetti, definitely not House Elves, sat at the counter, prize nestled between them.

A pot of hot chocolate and two teacups.

Lyra pushed the spare cup over to Draco.

“You really don’t know how to make hot chocolate? It’s simple. I still think we should clean up… What if-”

Draco waved his hand in front of his face as if he smelt something foul.

“It’s House Elf work, is what it is. Trust me. Mother’s been floo calling for the last two hours, Father’s likely in his study. By the time they check in on us, or the kitchens, Twinky will have all this cleaned up. She’ll only get annoyed if we try and fix it. She’s… Specific about where things go in the kitchen.”

Lyra chucked the spoon at his head.

Draco wasn't fast enough to dodge. 

“Is that why you brought me down here? Not to cheer me up with treacle tart and chocolate, but for me to make you a drink?”

Draco shrugged.

“If you can kill two Griffins with one spell, it’s idiotic not to.”

Lyra huffed.

“You’re a right self-serving bugger, do you know that? Here, have your hot chocolate. It’s the last you’re ever getting from me.”

The poor boy spluttered, hands tight around his tea cup, doing his best to paint on the face of a puppy. The bits of broken, dry spaghetti still sticking out from his pale hair like a misshapened crown, and the flour smeared down the front of his shirt and left eye only amplified the teasing glint to his smile. 

“Don’t be like that, Harriet-“

The air in the kitchen shifted, rolling cold, joy falling with Lyra's smile. 

“ _Lyra._ My name… My name is Lyra.”

She said the word as if she was stealing it, so fast with a snatch, and perhaps, Lucius thought, she was. Taking back what was taken from her, one word at a time. Finding a voice, after being voiceless, was an arduous task indeed. There was still unsurety there, as if she was tasting the vowels of an alien language, but it was battered with a greedy hunger. This was hers, and she had taken it, and no one was going to take it from her again.

It didn't escape Lucius's notice that she did not say Malfoy, _only_ Lyra, but, he supposed, it was a step. One word at a time, he reminded himself. Malfoy would be added to her vocabulary one day, he was sure, and with that word the notion of family with it. 

Draco beamed at her, and finding an opening, Lucius coughed into a fist, stepping forward. 

Both children jumped, startled, though, upon spotting his father in the doorway, Draco's grin returned in full force. 

Lyra's did not. 

She became a wide-eyed faerie, leaping down from her seat, darting away, further around the kitchen island, as far as she could get from him. 

Scared, Lucius's mind sluggishly supplied. 

She was scared, and it... Hurt. Hurt more than anything else he had ever seen, and he, regrettably, had seen some awful things in his long time in this realm. 

“You two should be in bed. It’s very late, and you should have been asleep hours ago.”

He couldn't see Lyra from over the kitchen island, only a pair of moonlight eyes and a crown of flour dusted silver curl. Draco, however, dashed out a pointed finger in her direction. 

“It was _all_ her idea. I was sleeping peacefully when-“

Before Lucius could tell Draco not to, Lyra was obviously panicked, inciting blame would only further withdraw the small child, Lucius, happily, was proven wrong. 

Lyra bulldozed out from the counter, glaring daggers at her brother, red cheeked and fiery. 

And not scared. 

Angry, yes, but _not_ frightened. 

And Draco knew what he had done. Lucius could see it in the gleam of his smile, the smile he was trying to hide between the insults the two twins began swiftly hurling each others way. 

“You liar! I woke up to you grinning at the bottom of my bed like a boggart! You-“

“Me? A boggart? Clearly not. That doesn’t sound anything like me. I'm a good boy. This, however, all this rule breaking, has _you_ written all over it and-“

“You troll bogey! You-“

“Children.”

Lucius didn't dare shout, afraid even a raised voice would frighten Lyra once more, but it was not needed. The argument fizzled out, as the children turned to him. 

For a while, perhaps confusingly to the children, Lucius only... Looked. Watched. Gazed at the pair. So alike and so dissimilar. Dawn and dusk, really. _Siblings._

Lucius had been an only child, lonely he would never admit, in a big house with a father often away on business than at home with him. Growing up, when the notion of making his own family finally began to take root in him, he pictured a house full of children, and laughter, and messes he never got to create. Fate, however, had different plans, though still he dreamed. 

Perhaps that is why the way Lyra looked at him earlier, in such fear and hesitance, hurt so much. 

It reminded him of himself, as a child, the way he looked to _his_ father, in the rare instances he was home, the stranger in the house, when he would berate Lucius for a lace out of place, or a lock of hair uncombed. 

_You are a Malfoy, boy, and Malfoy's do not do better, they do best. _

He had promised himself he would never become Abraxas. He had, in the early days of his marriage, gone as far to get Narcissa's oath that should the day come Draco, or any of their children if the old gods blessed them truly, looked to him as he did Abraxas as a child, even if it was but once, she would leave him and take their children.

Take them far away. 

So he looked to his children then, a son and a daughter smothered in flour and spaghetti with hot chocolate still smearing their upper lips, surrounded in an ungodly kitchen mess, and he did not shout, he did not berate, he did not scorn or deride. 

Lucius smiled because this, _here_ , was what he had always dreamed of. 

And as no one would take Lyra's name, no one would steal this from him.

_No one._

He'd burn Dumbledore and all his kind at the stake if they so much as _breathed_ in his children's direction. 

Abraxas had been right, in a warped sense. 

Malfoy's didn't do better, they did _best_ , especially when it came to their offspring. 

"Come, little soot sprites. Bring your hot chocolate, and we'll get you cleaned up. It's time for bed, Lyra needs her rest, and so do you Draco. We have a busy week ahead of us. I'll read you a bedtime story before sleep." 

Draco, though he was, unfortunately for Lucius, at the age where he boasted he no longer wanted to be tucked in or read to, something that Lucius had adored doing for years, bounced up, still _just_ young enough to enjoy the late night company of his father. Bounding over, Draco snatched up his father's waiting hand. 

Lyra did not move, motionless at the counter, weary. 

“A bedtime story… For me?”

Anew, it was as if she was speaking a foreign language, struggling to translate the meaning in her mind. Lucius did not push forward, he stood where he was and lifted his free hand, smiling still.

It was her choice. 

Perhaps she saw something in his open hand, perhaps it was that it was _open_ , but the drowsy storm that had been darkening her small features lifted, and she was smiling, plucking up the pot of hot chocolate, and bolting over. 

Slowly, she took his hand. 

_This_ was it, Lucius thought. His children safe in his grasp, where they always would be as long as he lived. 

He was not Abraxas Malfoy. 

He was better. 

Lyra rolled onto her back and stared up at the vaulted ceiling of the bedroom. _Her_ bedroom. An _actual_ bedroom, not a cupboard or closet, but a room with walls and beds and dressers and a real, huge window. 

Her window. 

She had a _window._

That, in and of itself, seemed like magic. 

Magic to a girl shoved and locked under stairs her entire life. 

Lucius sat beside the broad bed, in a plush chair, asleep next to Narcissa, who had come and joined them a few hours ago. The two were huddled, and they couldn't be comfortable, not with Lucius's neck craned back as it was, or the way Narcissa had to burrow at his side but...

But even here, in sleep, cramped as they were on a love-seat, they were... _Smiling._

They hadn't stopped. 

In truth, it had freaked her out a little in the beginning, until she found herself, unwittingly, smiling back, like happiness was a magnet, pulling joy deep from others. 

Draco was beside her on the bed, star fished out, spread on his belly, drooling. 

He snored.

_Monstrously._

She couldn’t sleep, but it wasn't the incessant snoring keeping her awake.

Lyra felt too... _Full._ Ready to burst at the seams. It was the only way she could describe it. Fullness. Full of crystal light and smiles and dreams and windows. Glorious windows.

Any second now, she thought she might pop. _Explode._

Or wake up back in her cupboard, this all but some hazy fever dream. 

Lyra didn't know when that became such a terrifying prospect, when she had stopped thinking this was a nightmare, but it _did_. The change happened somewhere between Narcissa's soft goodnight kiss to her forehead, and the bit of Lucius's tale of where the dragon slayed the nasty knight and princess and restored magic to the land, Lyra thought. 

There was food here. Real food and not bin scraps scavenged when Aunt Petunia turned in for the night. 

There were blankets too, thick ones, dense and warm. 

Stories of magic, and kisses, and windows she could look out of whenever she wanted, and... and... and...

All the things she never had, but wanted so desperately it burned. 

Quietly, gently, she raised the covers and slipped out of the bed. 

Draco didn't so much as stir, dead to the world. 

Her feet padded on the lush carpet, all the way to the window. 

_Her window._

Her fingers, almost possessively, tightened on the gilt sill. 

The moon was out, waning, a fingernail slither in the dark, speckled with a halo of stars. 

Lyra was a constellation, she had learned and she wondered if, up there, shining back, her name gave her light in the dark. 

She thought so. 

When she had told Draco earlier that her name was Lyra, not Harriet, she had felt a little... Spiteful. As if, even though he was not there, she was snubbing Dumbledore for how he acted earlier. _You could send Harriet back to the Dursleys, back to the mould, but you can't send Lyra there._

But it was more than just spite, or what she thought tasted like spite, it was also... Greed.

She wanted the bed, and she wanted the blankets, and she wanted, wanted so much, this window. Lyra could have those things, where Harriet could not. And maybe that made her a bit of a traitor, she felt like one a little, like a cuckoo in a robins nest, turning around and snatching a name just for warmth, food and light, but she wasn't really stealing, was she?

She was only taking back what was meant to be hers. 

She was Lyra, not Harriet, and maybe that wasn't so bad. 

A creak rang out beside her. 

Lyra span, just as something small and tiny darted at her, grabbing at her waist, pulling and-

“Oh, little Missus is back! Dobby is so happy! Dobby can speak again! Speak of Missus Lyra and the bad man and, oh, Dobby is so happy!”

Frantically, Lyra tried to peel the thing-

House Elf, it was definitely a House Elf, from her, but he stuck fast and hard like an octopus. 

Panicked, she glanced to the slumbering trio to the side. 

Not so much as a shiver or tremble. 

_Magic._

The House Elf must have muffled or silences them or their side of the room.

The poor thing looked close to tears. 

“The bad man? Who is the-“

The bloody thing then hushed her. 

“Shhh! The bad man is bad! Terrible! Never say his name! He hears, he does! He hurt Dobby when Dobby tried to keep Missus Lyra! Bonked him on the head and cast nasty magic on Dobby! Made Mistress and Master keep Dobby here, keep Dobby quiet, _hate_ Dobby! Never listen to Dobby! But Dobby remembered, he did! He remembered but couldn’t speak! Dobby was going to find you, but he couldn’t, Dobby swears! Dobby tried and tried and tried! Oh, bad Dobby! Bad, bad, bad Dobby!”

He pulled away, only to start viciously hitting himself in the head, whack, whack, whacking away. 

Whatever this bad man did to him, for Lyra had, in her limited experience, never seen a House Elf act _this_ way, leaping so easily from one extreme to the other, it was _dreadful._ Stretching out, she tried to grasp the little House Elf's wrists, trying to get him to stop, but he only halted when she hopelessly cried. 

“Don’t do that! Stop! It’s okay! I’m fine! Please, stop!”

Something was very strange about Dobby, because as soon as the hitting stopped, he smiled wonky, buzzing where he stood. 

"But Dobby knew you would come home, so Dobby hid it! As your Godfather asked him to! He knew as Dobby knew! Lyra is a Malfoy, Malfoys always survive!" 

Abruptly, he yanked himself away and, lifting a hand, clicked. 

He disappeared.

Just like that. 

Lyra blinked dazedly at the empty space. 

“Dobby? Dobby?”

No answer. 

Perhaps this _was_ a dream. 

Perhaps she really was tired. 

Just as she began to trek back to the bed, determined to fall asleep and perhaps forget this madness, another pop rang out and there he was. 

_Dobby._

A parcel wrapped in dirty, aged clothe clasped tightly in his hand. 

A slim parcel he urgently pushed towards her, silently begging for her to take. 

“You must take now, Missus Lyra! Take and learn! Godfather made Dobby promise, should he not be here, should the bad man prevail, to give you gift! Get strong, he said! Get strong! Must keep secret! Tell no one! Shhhhh! Take, Missus, _please!_ ”

He jabbed it at her like a sword, _take, take, take,_ punctuating each lunge. 

Wearily, she did just that, and as soon as the parcel was in her hands, Dobby vanished. 

Glancing down, she eyed it. 

It was rectangle, slim. 

The clothe fell to the floor at her feet under her nimble fingers. 

She edged closer to the window, the moon lighting up her gift. 

It was a book.

Leather bound.

Black.

A _diary._

An... Empty diary?

Maybe she should wake Narcissa up and tell her there was a slightly mad House Elf in her home. 

“Lyra, are you okay love?”

As if just the mere thought of the woman could summon her, Lyra swivelled around to find Narcissa raising from her seat, momentarily scrubbing the sleep from her eyes. 

Lyra hid the book behind her back. 

_Must keep secret!_

“Nightmare?”

Lyra shook her head.

“I couldn’t sleep.”

Narcissa grinned and drew back the covers of the bed, patting the empty spot. 

“You must try. To regain your strength.”

_Get Stronger!_

Now, Lyra knew she should show Narcissa the book behind her back. She knew that secrets, like the skull of a child buried in the garden, were bad things most often than not. She _knew._ Yet, the words never came. Instead, she rushed for the bed, keeping the book at her back before, as Narcissa turned to raise the covers over her slim shoulders, she shoved it deep under her pillow. 

_Tomorrow._

She would tell Narcissa tomorrow, after having just a little, only a little, Lyra promised, peek at the book. 

What harm could an empty diary do, anyway? And maybe it was a gift from a Godfather, and maybe Narcissa knew about it already. Maybe the House Elf _was_ crazy, and they would all laugh over this. 

You see, Lyra was a terribly abused child, and trust did not come easy. 

_Fear did._

Fear that she would have everything taken from her. 

As nice and kind as Narcissa and, surprisingly, Lucius and Draco turned out to be, maybe... Maybe they _could_ be like Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia. Because maybe they wouldn't believe her about Dobby, adults _never_ believed her, old insecurities and fears died hard, and what if they thought she stole it? What if they got angry? What if they decided, as Dumbledore did, to send her back to the Dursleys? What if-

Tomorrow, she would find where the diary had come from, and put it right on back. 

No one had to know. 

No one would miss it. 

“Do I have a godfather?”

Narcissa stalled, hands wrapped in the hem of her blanket, leaning over. It seemed as if the question, so innocent to Lyra, _hit_ her. She blinked, coughed, and smiled. 

It was a little tight in the corners. 

Strained. 

“Yes, yes you do, little love. Why do you ask?”

Lyra shrugged. 

“Hermione read that most pureblood children have a Godparent, mostly male. I was… Curious. Who is he?”

Fixing the Blanket, Narcissa sat on the edge of the bed, by her hip. 

“He was a very… Complicated man. You look a little like him, actually. It's the Godfather magics. The cheekbones and brow... But he’s gone now.”

_Gone._

Maybe that diary was the last thing of his. 

Maybe it was a parting gift. 

As her head rolled, she thought she could feel it beneath her pillow. 

_Must keep secret!_

If the... Bad man had done that to Dobby, maybe he was the same one who hid the skull in her garden. And if he was, if he could hear when someone said his name, maybe he had done something to her Godfather. Maybe he would try to do something to Narcissa, or Lucius, or Draco if he knew _Lyra_ knew. 

Maybe that's why she must keep it a secret. 

It didn't matter, tomorrow she would put it back.

Narcissa grinned, back to herself, and brushed away an errant lock of hair from Lyra's forehead. 

“Now, sleep. I promise to answer all your questions come morn. I’ll be right here when you wake up.”

As if on cue, Lyra yawned. 

Sleep first, mystery diaries later. 

Still, a tinge of fear crested in her belly. 

A tinge of fear that made her see her cupboard on the back of her eyelids every time she closed her eyes. 

“Do you promise?”

A sweet kiss to her sleepy brow. 

“On my honour as a witch, I’m not going anywhere.”

Finally, Lyra settled down, drifting off to sleep as a wind blew outside her window. 

The kind of wind that sounded like a voice. 

_Hello, Lyra, my name is Tom Riddle._

__

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thoughts?


	6. Old Friends, New Friends, and No Friend at all

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> PART ONE:  
> Lyra Malfoy and the Boy Who Lived In A Book.

Lyra Malfoy awoke to a noise both teeth grindingly grating, and simultaneously thrilling. The sound common all over the Wizarding world come morning and evening.

The sound of an owl pecking at her window.

Immediately, Lyra was wide awake, kicking off her blankets, which had gotten rather tangled between her legs, and slipping across the hard wood flooring once or twice on her harried feet, she finally made it to the large window, beaming from ear to ear.

"Hedwig!"

The window clunked open, and Hedwig, almost blinding white in the low morning sun, came soaring in above her head, sweeping across the ceiling of the bed room, before she swooped down over the bed Lyra had just vacated. The stack of letters and rolled parchment Hedwig had clutched between her talons dropped, coincidentally, or so Lyra would say, right onto a still slumbering Draco Malfoy's face.

Lyra was unsure whether the surprised chirp that came blistering through the air was from bird or boy, as the latter blindly batted about his face in shock of being awoken so suddenly, and finding himself buried under envelope, and very nearly rolled off the bed as Hedwig came flapping back to Lyra, perching on the window sill.

"I knew you would find me."

Hedwig jostled in place, clacking her talons on the wood, and then hooted indignantly as she pecked softly at Lyra's fingers for a treat the young girl did not have. Lyra did the next best thing, petted at her head instead with clumsy fingers, scratching at the very top, ruffling feathers, and the hoot turned to a cooing mewl.

Luckily for the young girl, Hedwig had been out the day Lyra found the skull in the garden, delivering a letter to Hermione and Ron, and, perhaps, that was the only thing that had saved her from Vernon and Petunia's wrath when they, inevitably, discovered Lyra was missing, and was not coming back anytime soon.

By the time Hedwig had begun to calm down and nest herself into the window, Draco, the only other inhabitant of the large bedroom, Lucius and Narcissa must have awoken even earlier than they, was up, thumbing through her stack of letters.

"Seems like you're popular. You must have letters from half of Slytherin here."

Begrudgingly pulling herself away from Hedwig, who was now dozing off, Lyra made her way back over to the bed, clambering up the side like a spider to find a seat beside Draco and the, quite frankly, scarily sized pile of correspondents. It was the most post Lyra had ever received in all her life, and all in one day. So many people who wanted to speak to… Well, to _her._ How very, very strange… And a little terrifying.

Alright, a bit more than a _little_ terrifying.

It was bloody bonkers.

What could all these people want with her?

_From Her?_

"Want to help?"

It was a silly question to ask. Of course Draco Malfoy wanted to help, if only so he could quench his curiosity too about what was lurking between the leafs of pages waiting around them.

It turned out there was nothing much at all nefarious as Lyra first thought there would be from a pile of letters sent by a group of shadowy Slytherins.

In truth, It was all rather... Kind?

If not kind, Slytherins were not so outwardly straightforward Lyra was discovering quickly, they were _polite._

Draco found a letter from a Slytherin boy called Marcus Flint, a name that rang a fuzzy bell until Draco pointed out it was the Slytherin Quidditch Captain, who said he was holding the position of Seeker in the Slytherin team open should she be resorted into their House. Lyra ripped open a letter from a girl called Pansy Parkinson, asking her to Sunday tea next week. Draco slipped free a letter from Maleficent Bulstrode requesting Narcissa and Lyra visit herself and her mother soon. Both twins huddled over the letter from a boy called Adrian Pucey, a Seventh Year Draco elucidated, the Seventh Year Head Boy in fact, who bid his assistance if Lyra had any questions about Slytherin, and ending with a promise to give her a tour of their common rooms in three weeks when they returned to Hogwarts, should she be sporting the green and silver by that time.

Lyra had a Quidditch match proposal from Zabini, and a shopping trip suggestion from the Greengrass sisters, and she even had a welcome back, as if she had merely gone on vacation and not been living as some sort of Potter-impostor for eleven years, letter from Theodore Nott, packed with a rather expensive looking box of chocolates.

Chocolates Draco tore apart and devoured.

He really did have a horrendous sweet tooth, and coming from Lyra, that was _something._

"Why are they all being so nice?"

Draco scoffed around a particularly delicious looking powdered truffle.

"Because you're one of us now, or might soon well be, and we look after our own."

Was that what all this was? Lyra tried to imagine it in reverse. If it were Draco who one day awoke with onyx hair and Potter blood, if a resorting was shortly in his suddenly confusing future, what would Gryffindor do?

_Close ranks._

Lyra knew that instantly. A Slytherin coming into the griffin nest? He would have never shaken off his scales, not in the view of the Gryffindors, and if he could not be seen as anything other than a snake, than he would not have been trusted. Not a bit. Not at all.

For a supposedly brave lot, the adventurous type, Gryffindor's could be awfully closed minded, suspicious and paranoid.

Lyra too, she would admit. For, if it truly been reversed, if Draco had been sitting next to her, on her broken cot in the under-stairs cupboard, she knew she would not have trusted him either. And what did that say about her? To judge someone for the colour of scarf they were six months a year? Nothing good, she supposed, but... But that didn't mean she couldn't try _now._

Perhaps being unprejudiced and accepting was not about always being that way, but about _learning_ to be that way. Like a muscle one hardly used, one needed exercise it, see it for what it was, something weak that could grow, and do just that.

"I suppose Slytherins aren't all that bad."

After a long year of antagonizing and similarly being antagonized by the very same Slytherins that now swarmed her bed in letters and ink and tasty chocolates, it was the best Lyra could do. By the roguish grin now stretching Draco's mouth wide, a grin that appeared to belong to a cat who not only found the cream but the dairy factory too, it was just enough of an admittance.

Yet, the grin dropped down dead when his gaze flickered to one of the only unopened letter's left.

"This one's addressed to _Harriet_?"

He plucked it up from the blanket, and flashed the envelope her way.

Lyra recognised the writing immediately, and swifter still, stole the letter from his grip.

_Hermione._

It was a small thing, thin too, straight to the point as Hermione always was.

Lyra ripped into it.

**_I do not know quite how to address you anymore, or which you prefer, Lyra or Harriet, and so, I've gone with what I believe would lead to this letter finding you easiest. I hope the reason you have not wrote to me over the last two weeks is because you are horribly busy, happy and safe, and not dead or worse. I read my father's daily prophet subscription some time ago, you know how he likes to keep up with wizarding news, and I can't imagine what you are going through. I would like to think you know you can speak to me, if you need an ear to listen. Potter or Pygmy Puff, you are my dearest friend, and I should hope, above all, you would know this by now. Mother and father are taking me to Diagon Alley Monday to buy my school supplies, and I'll see you there. Stay safe. Love, Hermione J. Granger._ **

**_P.S Just because you've gone and changed faces does not mean you can slack off, Harriet! Don't forget to do your preliminary reading for Second Year._ **

Lyra could not stop the laughter from building in her chest, a burst of colour and light. Hermione, only concerned with acceptable letter manners, school, and homework.

Excited, she dived for the remaining letters, searching, scanning... Searching again, scanning some more... Again, just to be sure...

"What's wrong?"

Sluggishly, Lyra drew away from the letters at Draco's loaded question.

"There isn't a letter from Ron."

If Hermione, home in the Muggle world for the last few months, had heard the news, saw it printed across Prophet paper, there was no possible way Ron had not also. Arthur, like Lucius, worked at the ministry. Ron had heard, Lyra held no doubt in that.

Yet, there was _no_ letter.

"Perhaps he will send one later?"

It seemed to physically pain Draco to, in any form, in any shape, stick up for Ron, but he did, for Lyra, and that eased some of the sudden stinging at her eyes. Lyra shrugged, hoping her shoulders didn't tremble as bad as they felt like they were.

"Maybe."

But Lyra did not think it was maybe at all. Ron had not sent a letter, and that meant... Something entirely too deep and too painful to truly think about. Not this early in the morning.

Before anymore could be said, the door to the bedroom swept open, and Narcissa Malfoy, already primed and ready for the day, came gliding in on heels that clacked and clicked against the hardwood floor, smiling at the bedraggled children sprawled across the bed.

"I see my two hibernating bear cubs have decided to rear their heads for spring. Good. I was beginning to-"

Narcissa froze beside the bed, lofty and elegant and hair coiled like fine threads of silver-gold, peering down right at Lyra.

The smile wavered for a moment, just a flash, before it bloomed like a rose, as her hand came out, drifting over Lyra's, likely monstrously, fuzzy unbrushed curls.

"You look much better this morn."

The hand slipped from the crown of her head, down to cradle her chin, a silky slope of tender affection.

Lyra did, in fact, feel much better. There was no spasming muscles, no broken shards of glass in her joints, not even a twinge at her temple. Indeed, even the purple bruise on her shoulder, which had come from Vernon three weeks ago, felt like nothing but a warm patch of soft flesh.

Lyra did not just feel better, she felt... _Best._

The best she had in a long, long while.

Her answering grin came easy.

"I feel better."

However, despite this reassurance, there was something furrowing between Narcissa's brows, caught between worry and apprehension and something jaded.

"I thought you would need more time and potions but-… I suppose a good nights rest really _can_ do wonders."

The crease was gone, whatever it was, smoothed out to supple comfort.

Still, it had lasted just long enough for Lyra to begin questioning herself. Good things did not come free, and exactly why was she feeling so well, when only yesterday she had felt like death warmed over?

Why didn't Ron send a letter?

Who killed little Harriet Potter?

Who buried her in Petunia's garden?

Who took her from the Malfoys?

Who was this 'bad man'?

Who hurt Dobby so?

So many questions, and not a single answer to find. And one, just one question, that had gotten Lyra through thick and thin before.

_What would Hermione do?_

Hermione would know what to do. She was the brightest witch Lyra knew, much smarter than some wizards and witches thrice her age, and if there was a riddle out there to unearth, an answer in need of discovering, Hermione would have sniffed it out in no time.

And what would Hermione do?

Go to the library.

So that was where Lyra needed to go.

_The library._

"Now, Draco, off you go to your own rooms. I want you both dressed and ready and down in the foyer in ten minutes. Lyra has a guest waiting for her downstairs."

Draco leapt from the bed, ever curious, ever eager.

"Who?"

Narcissa shooed him, but it only seemed to excite the boy more.

"You'll see when you get dressed."

However, being his mother, Narcissa appeared to know exactly what to say and do to get the boy to do as she bid, evident by the way Draco flooded out the room in a blond blur.

"I've put some clean clothes in the dresser over there. They might not fit the best, as I had to guess the measurements, but they'll do for the time, before we go to Diagon Alley to pick up school supplies and get you some robes that fit."

Lyra bounced up.

"Can we go Monday?"

Narcissa cocked a brow, and Lyra furthered.

"My friend Hermione is going Monday and she wants to meet up."

Narcissa glanced between the small child and the letters scattered over the bed, before she gently nodded.

"I see no problem with that, as long as Severus clears your health first. You may look better but… Better safe than sorry, as they say. I'll leave you to get changed in peace, but I'll be waiting just outside the door if you need me."

Lyra nodded, and Narcissa made her way to leave, only to pause at the door one last time, glancing over curved shoulder.

"Are you sure you're feeling well, Lyra?"

Lyra smiled her best grin, toothy, large, dimpled.

"Never better."

Narcissa softened right before her, like clay left out in the rain, shutting the door behind her, and Lyra...

Well, Lyra glanced behind her, to the pillow on the bed. Reaching out, she lifted the corner.

The black diary stared back innocently.

She had such strange dreams last night.

Dreams about vast dark chambers, and scales that slipped like cool water over skin, and a snake hissing a lullaby, and a boy called Tom in Slytherin Robes, smiling at her and-

But that was silly, wasn't it?

Even in the wizarding world, Boys didn't live in books.

Picking up the diary, Lyra marched right on over to her dresser, yanked open an empty draw, and dumped the book into the dark depths.

Her hand froze upon the handle.

A flicker of hesitation.

Hesitation Lyra promptly shook off.

"Silly dreams, indeed."

Lyra slammed the drawer shut.

She needed to find a Library, return the diary from where it was hidden or stolen, find some answers to the long list of questions, meet the guest down stairs, but first?

First, she needed to get dressed.

When Lyra made it downstairs, it was after Draco, and to find the blue sitting room, for Malfoy Manor had too many sitting rooms to _not_ colour code, packed with Lucius, Professor Snape, Narcissa, and a rather shabby looking man resting on the couch. Lucius was the first to spot her, hesitating by the door.

He smiled, much like her own smile, dimpled and a bit too toothy, and waved her in.

How very odd.

Uncle Vernon would have tried to throw something at her to get her to shoo, if they had guests around.

It felt... warm, like something warm and sticky and sweet like honey, to be greeted so happily.

To actually be _wanted._

"Ah, here she is. Lyra, this is Remus Lupin. He is going to be your new Defence Against the Dark Arts Teacher this September. He's come to say hello."

The shabby man, this Remus Lupin, seemed to be... Contradictory, by mere presence alone. Outwardly, he was not much to look at, tumbledown and ramshackle as he was, in second hand Wizarding robes, the first signs of grey streaking at his temples, though he appeared, beneath the plethora of scars on show, quite young. And yet, Lyra could sense there was something there, lurking beneath the kind book-shop owner facade, something prowling below the ill bruises thumbed below eye, the exhaustion sloping shoulder, that screamed... _Predatory._

This sickly-sense was made worse as Lupin stood from his seat, all six-five of himself, although he hunched something fierce to hide his bulk, and softly smiled at her, shy and cautious by equal measures.

"Hello Lyra, it's very nice to meet you."

Lyra did not move away from the door, she did not think she _could_ even if she had wanted to.

She was not scared of this Remus Lupin per-se. It was not something so easily defined. Lyra had a terrible fear of... Well, adults in general. Vernon had been a relatively small man, though he was larger by girth than many, and she knew, _personally_ , how hard his fists could be.

If this Lupin lost his temper with Lyra, he could snap her like a turkey wishbone.

And of course he could lose his temper.

Lyra had the nasty habit of saying all the wrong things at exactly the wrong time.

Narcissa stood from her seat.

"Why don't we leave you two to chat while we go next door to the brandy cabinet?"

Lyra wanted to yell no, say please, perhaps even turn tail and run, so suddenly and terrible hooked with fear like thorns were blooming beneath her skin, but she found herself voiceless, almost helpless, as Narcissa, Lucius, Professor Snape and a whining Draco began to trickle out the side door to the blue sitting room, and her feet braced and-

And Narcissa left the side room door open, wide like a hungry mouth, and she did not go further than the table beside it, with a clear view into the room, a clear shot at Lyra, and as quick as it came the fear was gone, washed away.

From the corner, Narcissa winked at her, much like a Quidditch captain before a big match.

_I am here, you can do this, go get them._

For the first time in her short life, Lyra felt... _Safe._

Safe and bigger than any angry man.

Straightening out, Lyra, head held high, and marched into the sitting room.

"Defence against the Dark Arts teachers don't normally make house calls introducing themselves to their students."

Lupin grinned, almost like a father proud of their child, and still, even his quite predominant fangs did not scare Lyra.

She was safe.

_Safe._

No one could hurt her ever again.

Not even this big contradictory man.

If he tried, she would bite his kneecaps off.

Because that was what a Malfoy would do, and Lyra _was_ a Malfoy.

"No, I don't suppose they do. But you're not a typical student are you, Lyra?"

No, she supposed she was not typical in any sense of the word, if only for being a witch, but Lyra _wanted_ to be, and to have it so brazenly pointed out, her oddities highlighted with a caring grin of a stranger, heckled her.

"What do you want?"

Lupin sat back down on the seat he vacated, patting the golden threaded cushion next to him. Lyra waited two heartbeats before she took the offering.

"I thought I would come to tell you Harriet… The skull you found, and the rest of the remains, will be buried next to her parents, Lily and James, next week in a funeral. I, and your... Parents thought you might like to go and pay your respects."

Lyra frowned, shoulders hunching in on herself before she could force them to relax.

The proposal... Stung. Stung in the way having something snatched from your hands hurt, not physically, but something internal wrenching at having... Lost something so loved. Lyra could not quite understand why, but she thought, though seeing the remains laid to rest beside her pare-... Beside Lily and James Potter was the right thing to do, that if she stood there, at the girl-... At Harriet's grave, it would make it all-

_Real._

Real and irreversible.

Harriet was dead, and yet Lyra still lived, and how was she to carry on if she was _also_ in a grave and-

In a way, that child, that small, small skull _was_ herself.

How could she accept an invitation to her own funeral?

"Why?"

Lupin's gaze, a startling amber almost unnatural, rinsed to something soft and gentle and jarringly sad.

He saw her, Lyra knew.

Saw the war going on in her head, where logic, knowing she was Lyra and not Harriet, _Harriet was dead_ , battling against the unreasonable notion that she was having her life stolen from her, her name buried under six foot of dirt, a life she would never get to have again locked in a casket, as sad and brutal as it had been, it had all been _hers._

"Because sometimes, Lyra, it is good to see things _end._ Sometimes it is good to see things end, to say goodbye so you can move on. Perhaps seeing Harriet laid to rest will allow you to truly begin _being_ Lyra. Having your identity stolen from you can be... Well, I imagine it to be very confusing. It might be hard to see, it might hurt very much, but sometimes broken bones are stronger more for the pain."

And she wanted that.

Lyra truly did.

She wanted to not be confused, she wanted to be able to look into a mirror and not jump at the stranger staring back, she wanted to feel at home not only in this grand home, but in her skin too.

Yet, there was one problem a funeral could not fix.

_Justice._

"But it's not ended, has it? Not at all. Children don't just… _Die_ , and they definitely don't end up buried in backyards beneath aunt Petunia's marigold patch. Someone did that… Someone who got away with it. That… That doesn't seem right to me. They're still out there."

Remus nodded.

"You're very wise for your age, aren't you, Lyra? We call that having an old soul where I'm from. That is why I think I can be honest with you now."

Bracing his elbows on his long legs, Remus leaned in closer, meeting her eye, face solemn, serious, open.

"No, I don't think this has ended. I think it has only just begun. But we are searching for the culprits. We're not going to let this slide, even if your-… Petunia and Vernon are gone."

Lyra frowned.

"Gone? What do you mean gone?"

Remus sighed.

"As Harriet's guardians, they must have… Known something. We went to their house but the house is empty. They're gone. Do you know where they might be, Lyra? A vacation house they have? A friend they talked about visiting?"

Lyra shook her head.

"Vernon has work, he wouldn't just pack up and leave for a vacation, and the only person they would visit would be Marge, but Vernon doesn't like her, and she comes to Vernon when she visits not the other way around."

Remus gaze drifted away, a shadow, a dark thing, hooding his eyes from amber to something that reminded Lyra of the flickering flames of fire.

"That's what I thought."

But then Lupin was smiling, closed lipped, dark shadows no where to be seen, and he was smiling gently again, placing a soft hand on her shoulder.

Lyra tried not to flinch at the sudden and swift change, the abrupt movement.

She halfway made it.

"It does not change what I have said this morning. There is nothing to fear, Lyra. We'll get to the bottom of this. I promise. Until then, be you. Not Harriet, not what or who you think Lyra _should_ be, just you, and someday, I swear, that will feel as natural as breathing."

His hand slipped from her shoulder, back onto his tweed patterned leg.

"Why do you care so much?"

As Lupin saw her so clearly, Lyra saw him too.

This was personal for him.

The shadow, she had a name for it now.

_Grief._

He was grieving as much, perhaps more, than she was.

Remus turned it over for a long while, chewing his words, picking his thoughts carefully, before he answered her.

"I was friends with James and Lily when we all went to Hogwarts. They were like-... They _were_ my family."

Only a week ago, Lyra would have loved meeting this man, something physical that linked her back to James and Lily, something she could question and hold close, she would have had a thousand questions for him, some that went on for days or months, but... But now, she only had one.

"Why did you never visit me-… Harriet?"

There was no malice in her voice, no sign or hair of an accusation. She is only, _genuinely_ , curious.

Perhaps it was this sincere, low murmured question, that made Lupin look so poignantly sad.

"I should have. If I had, perhaps all this would have…"

He shook his head, gathered his thoughts anew.

"Sometimes adult's don't do what they should, Lyra, they only do what is _easy_. It was a mistake. One of my biggest, and for that I am sorry, Lyra. To you, to little Harriet… _I am incredibly sorry,_ and I can only swear that I will not make the same mistake again."

They let this hang in the air between them, not really an ending but something beginning, an apology acting as a promise.

Sometimes it was good to see things end, Remus had said.

If only to see something better begin, Lyra would finish.

She would go to the funeral. She would say her goodbyes. She would _not_ forget, and she would _not_ forgive, but she could move on, and perhaps that was what living truly was. Ends and beginnings melding into one lapping wave.

Eventually, Remus nodded over to the open door.

"Now why don't you go and join young Draco. He looks ready to try crawling in here on his belly to get a betting spying spot."

Lyra glanced over just quick enough to spot the blond head ducking back behind the door frame.

She grinned.

Bloody idiot.

Still, he was... Well, Draco was _her_ bloody idiot twin.

Maybe saying goodbye to Harriet would not be so painful. Hard yes, but painful? Perhaps not.

Hopping off the sofa, Lyra began to stroll towards the side door, to the family waiting over it, _her_ family, but paused by the cusp as Lupin's voice, smooth like chocolate, hit her back.

"Oh, and Lyra?"

She peered over to him.

"That's a very pretty dress. Green was James's favourite colour, despite what he told everyone. It... Suits you."

Lyra glanced down at herself. It _was_ a pretty dress. Not fancy with frills and bows as she had expected something out of a Malfoy closet to be, but simple and soft, velvet and silk, and it fit her properly, and it was all hers, never been worn before, and best of all, Narcissa had magicked _pockets._

Lyra found herself peeking through the door before her, to Narcissa pretending not to look next to Lucius, who in turn didn't even pretend to not be watching, and Draco, being restrained by the hand on his shoulder, but bouncing on his heel, all waiting-

All waiting for _her._

Suddenly, Ron's missing letter didn't mean much, or the dread of being sorted into Slytherin, or the irrational fear of funerals and adults.

Lyra glanced back one last time, grinning, loud, clear.

"My mother made it for me."

It was the first time she called Narcissa that, and it felt... Right. Not rushed, not forced, just... Right. Because while Lily would always, in some way, be a mother to her in her thoughts and heart, Lily had been the _only_ mother Lyra had known for twelve years, Narcissa was _too._

_She was her mother._

Her mother who checked in on her in the morning, who gave her dresses with pockets, who read bedtime stories and winked at her bravely.

Her mother, Lyra could see, who loved her dearly already.

And perhaps she loved her a little too.

Lucius too, with his dimpled grin and soft hand, and kisses to the crown of her head.

And, she supposed, Draco wasn't half bad.

_Alright._

Maybe, just maybe, she loved him a little, _only a little_ , bit.

Perhaps that was odd, and not so typical, to love people who you had only truly known for three days, but, then again, Lyra was not a typical student, not a typical girl, and perhaps families in general were not something so easily labelled or defined or reasoned away with logic and, she thought, perhaps Love was not either.

Lyra had known more kindness, more gentleness, more warmth and love in these last three days than she had ever in twelve years.

A strangled noise croaked out from behind her, and as Lyra turned, she found Narcissa smiling, smiling with wet eyes, which was odd, wasn't it? To smile _and_ cry?

"I look forward to teaching you this September."

Lyra nodded goodbye and left.

Left to join her family waiting for her.

Narcissa was on her the moment she was in, sweeping her up, holding her close, still strangely crying and smiling, _adults truly were befuddling creatures,_ and... _Yes._

This is what home felt like.

Severus Snape, alongside Lucius, had seen Remus out only a few hours ago, and now stood, together once more, at the ajar door of the grand Malfoy library, where Lyra had requested to visit. The two children inside, hunched over a stack of books, seemed to be in a world of their own, nattering between one another, undisturbed by Lucius and Severus checking upon them.

Nevertheless, despite the youthful and merry picture the twins painted, just far enough away that he could not hear their conversation, Snape scowled as he watched Lyra from the crack in the door.

"Why the long face, friend! Tis good news!"

Snape only scowled harder.

"The curse Lyra barely survived from three days ago was _dark_ magic. Some of the darkest magics I have seen. Savage in its attack to her core… Do you know what damage my diagnosis spells rang with this morning?"

Lucius sighed.

"I was there. _None._ She's healed wonderfully in such a short time-"

" _Exactly._ Nothing at all. There should be some scar or wound or injury, if not physically than at the very least to her magical core, and yet there is _nothing_. Overnight she has healed as if it has been a decade since the curse. Something is not right, Lucius."

Severus and Lucius pulled away from the door, hissing lowly at one another, careful in not alarming the children just behind brick and mortar, and expensive wallpaper.

"Perhaps you are seeing an issue where there _isn't_ an issue to solve. We have bigger demons to slay than overactive healing. One battle at a time, my friend, _please_. I am not as young as I used to be, and be it magic, rite, or sheer luck that sees my daughter well this day, I find myself only thankful."

Snape sighed deeply.

"You're right, I suppose."

Lucius was, evidently, _not_ right at all. However, Severus could understand his caution in questioning the well-being of his daughter. One did not naturally question why one had won the lottery, after all, they simply enjoyed the luck they had uneasily discovered after a lifetime of being poverty stricken. Furthermore, Lucius being _Lucius,_ as stubborn and unrelenting as the girl in the library, it was useless in picking a fight where Lucius saw none. He would only dig his heels in further.

Severus could wait.

Lucius would see.

Something was going on with Lyra Malfoy.

"How do you know if any books have gone missing if there are so many?"

Malfoy library housed nearly an impossible number of shelves, stretching as far as the eye could see, row after row neatly lined with books and waxed leather spines, high shelves, low shelves, and shelves so far up Lyra had to tilt her head all the way backwards until her neck twanged. There were floor cushions embroidered in silver and gold, and comfortable leather arm chairs studded with brass, and tables for quiet study polished to a shine, spread over a marbled floor speckled with fur rugs.

Hermione, if she ever saw this place, would have her head explode.

Lyra, however, was simply trying to find a spot, a place, a little row to start her search on.

Draco, picking off imaginary lint from his cashmere jumper, everything about this place, even its inhabitants, was all finery, shrugged.

"If a single book in this library is taken without father's strict consent, and carried out of this room, the wards go off. You can't miss that. Why? Thinking of nabbing one?"

Lyra shook her head at Draco's almost daring tone.

The diary had not come from here then, otherwise the alarms, the wards, would have gone off.

So where did it come from?

A diary didn't just pop up out of nowhere, as a skull was not found in a garden, and a family like the Durselys didn't just go missing.

Something was going on.

Something _big_ , and, Lyra swore, she was going to figure it out.

"No reason, just curious on how all this knowledge is protected."

Draco shrugged, perhaps looking a little disappointed at her answer.

Lyra didn't want to tell him the truth, tell him about the House Elf and dairy. At the very least, if they were found out, he would get into trouble too. At worst?

The bad man would hurt him instead of her, and she didn't-

She couldn't-

_No._

For now, it was best kept as a secret.

Denied entertainment from Lyra, Draco, clearly by the grin stretching his face tight, thought of his own to pass the time.

"I know what you will like!"

He ran off through the towering stacks before Lyra could so much as say boo. Fortunately, however, she was not forced to wait in limbo long, as he came dashing back, hair mussed by his speed, a large leather bound portfolio clasped safely between his hands.

Plopping down on the nearest floor cushion, Lyra joined him on the closest one, as he unwound the twisted ribbon knot, and began to flick through the black papers.

Moving photos stared back at the twins.

"Is that Narcissa and Lucius?"

The pair looked young and carefree in this photo, Narcissa in a dress of snow-fall white, Lucius a crisp, sharp robe, with hair that barely fluttered at his broad shoulders. Lucius was picking Narcissa up by the waist, arching her around as she laughed, head flung back and so very happy, dipping her low for a sweet kiss.

"At their bonding ceremony, yes."

Draco flicked the page over.

"That's them in their seventh year along with Slytherin House."

Lyra looked at the sea of students, a sky of fresh young faces, when a familiar curl caught her eye, a curl Lyra herself had upon her head. She pointed to the girl scowling in the third row.

"Who's that?"

Draco glanced up, almost shocked Lyra did not know, as if she were meant to know third or fourth year Slytherins from nearly twenty years ago, and she had not spent, in total, a measly nine months in the Wizarding world.

"that's aunt Bellatrix, our mother's sister…"

He lent over the portfolio to get closer, voice dropping.

"I heard father speaking about her once with mother. She's in _Azkaban_."

Lyra frowned.

"Azkaban? What's that?"

Obviously not being secretive enough for Draco's tastes, for he hushed her down with a frantic flap of his hand and a weary glance to the library door and the nearest painting, which was of a second removed great cousin slumbering away in a Victorian nightcap that looked like a doily, he finally calmed down when nothing seemed to jump out between the stacks of books, and tried to eat him whole.

"Doesn't Gryffindor teach anything? Azkaban is a prison. _The_ prison. The worst one there is. Right nasty place, I heard. Aunt Bellatrix was taken there nearly twelve years ago, along with her husband, Rodulphus."

To hammer his point home, Draco searched through the portfolio, until he stumbled across another wedding photo, not of Narcissa and Lucius, but of the wild haired woman, keenly grinning from the shadows of a garden veranda, beside a man, very tall by the looks of it, with dark gold hair and the face of a fallen angel.

The pair waved at her from the glossy paper.

Bellatrix even blew a kiss.

Lyra pointed to the man lurking in the background, perhaps slightly smaller than Rodolphus, but stockier, hair curlier, jaw sharper, more angled-

More _wild._

"Who's that one?"

He was standing close to the groom, with just enough similarities to hint at a familial relation, what must have been the best man, or the Wizarding equivalent.

"That's Rabastan Lestrange, Rodolphus's younger brother. He's in Azkaban too. Mum said he could charm the rivers to run upwards, if he wanted, or for fish to fly."

He couldn't be much older than eighteen in the photo, and not many years older since he was put in Azkaban. However, before Lyra could dig any further, suddenly so very curious, Draco was moving on, skimming through the pages.

He stopped at one, chuckling.

"That was dad in seventh year. He was Seeker, did you now? It must be where you get it from because mother hates flying. He was good enough to give Potter a run for his money and-"

But Draco's voice was drowned out because, underneath the candid shot of their parents, is another, a pair, a woman and a man, and abruptly, Lyra wasn't in the room anymore.

It was a flicker, this memory she suddenly had, this memory that stole her senses, like smoke and oil, slippery to hold, but… _Yes_ , a woman, _that_ woman, yelling at her mother, and the other man holding a wand to her father's throat and words jumbled and the wand turning to her and her father yelling and-

A horrid burst of green that made her feel sick.

So very sick.

No, she didn't feel sick.

She _was_ sick.

She vomited right then and there, onto the floor before them, heaving drily as Draco squealed and scuttled away, as a House Elf, decidedly not Dobby, appeared with a pop, already cleaning as she pulled back on crashed knee, breathless, heart pounding so fiercely in her chest, something squeezing at her ribs and-

"Bloody hell! What was that about?"

She did not answer, she only gestured to the dropped photo, wheezing through her words.

Maybe after the glamours and Polyjuice potion had been ripped from her, whatever spells that had been used to implant memories of James and Lily's death, and the ones to strip her own, for even two year olds have memories, were beginning to crack because that flicker had…

It had felt _real._

"Who are they?"

Draco plucked up the photo, took a peek, voice wavering, frown deep.

"That's Alice and Frank Longbottom. They used to be friendly with mother but… Well, mum never speaks of it. They were close with Dumbledore."

_Dumbledore._

All roads led back to him.

Neville's parents too, it seemed.

"Where are they now?"

Draco blinked owlishly, like a deer caught in a bear trap.

"Do you want me to get mother? Father? Maybe you should go back to bed and we can-"

Lyra, not unkindly, cut him off, still having trouble finding her voice, catching her breath.

"Where are they now?"

Lyra heard him swallow.

"In Saint Mungo's, last I heard. That's why aunt Bellatrix is in Azkaban. She and her husband and Rabastan went after them the night the Potters die-… _Well_. They're no longer right in the head anymore, let's just put it like that."

Then, if they were tortured, for surely that was what Draco was alluding to with so many words, and put into Saint Mungo's when the Potter's were murdered, then _how_ did she have that memory? It had felt real, so very bloody real, it _was_ real, Lyra knew it, then... How?

Lyra was abducted between fifteen months old, perhaps slightly older, all the way up to age two-to-three.

The timeline didn't match up-

A time-line, in some areas, only validated by one man.

_Albus Dumbledore._

Everyone else who witnessed, or could know the truth, was either in Azkaban, Saint Mungo's, or a graveyard.

That couldn't be a coincidence, could it?

"Why do you want to know so much?"

Lyra reached out and ripped out the photo of Frank and Alice from the portfolio, folding it cleanly before putting it in her pocket before she met Draco's worried gaze.

She had found her starting point.

"I think they tried to hurt me once."

Lyra knew she could not do this alone. She knew too little about the Wizarding world. She did not know about Azkaban or Saint Mungo's or Gringotts, and if she was ever going to know the truth, find justice for little Harriet, she needed someone who _did_ know the ins and outs of Wizarding Britain.

It just so happened she had the biggest gossip, who could not, for the life of him, keep his nose out of other people's business for a twin brother.

Lyra came clean, or as clean as she could when she could not trust her own memories, as the two siblings made their way through the winding halls to the relative privacy of her bedroom, furiously whispering to one another.

"So let me get this straight. Some whacked-out House Elf appears in the middle of the night, sprouting utter nonsense, gives you this strange, empty diary, and what do you do? You _sleep_ on it? Do you have no self-preservation instincts at all?"

Lyra huffed and picked up her pace, forcing Draco to jog to keep up.

"I told you, it's clear Dobby was bewitched, or tortured, or _both_ , by this 'bad man'. And by the way he was speaking, this bad man is _still_ around. He's _still_ a threat. Dobby said my godfather went against him, and left me this diary. I didn't want anyone to get hurt over a blank book so I hid it."

Draco clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, a habit he had, Lyra had found, when he was thinking hard and deep.

"And now you're having memories of Alice and Frank Longbottom what… Arguing with mother and father?"

Lyra slowed to a stop around the corner of the corridor, peering back and forth to make sure the pair were alone.

"He, Frank, I'm sure it was Frank, had a wand to father's neck, and mother was crying and… The woman, Alice, spat something and lifted her own wand and... A wand was pointed at me and… A flash of green. That's all I remember. But it was real. I _know_ it was."

Draco bleached to a horrible white, paler than moonlight.

His voice cracked like shattered glass as he spoke.

" _Green_?"

Lyra nodded, puzzled by his trepidation.

In the muggle word, green _meant_ good.

It meant going safely at traffic lights, and healing, and summer grass, and peppermint tea, and all the things Lyra liked.

"There's only one spell I know of that flashes bright green…The killing curse."

He whispered the last three words, and Lyra grimaced.

Perhaps not so good then.

"So they didn't just try to hurt me once… They tried to _kill_ me."

Draco shook his head, blond locks falling into his sharp eyes.

"But if they _did_ fire the killing curse at you… How are you still alive? You _should_ be dead. The only person who has ever survived the killing curse is…."

Draco stopped himself from finishing the sentence, understanding its redundancy, and Lyra stitched together the puzzle pieces before them.

"The very girl I've been living as for the last decade. Only, she's dead, and I'm _here_ , so perhaps one of us didn't survive our attempted murder. This can't be a coincidence."

Draco agreed.

"Father always says there is no such thing as coincidences, only plans unseen… But none of it makes a lick of sense. We're missing something here… Missing something _big_."

The pair continued their trek towards the bedroom, silent and thinking, all the way to the drawer in her cupboard, which Lyra pulled open.

"There it is-"

Only the Diary wasn't there. The drawer was empty.

Lyra shoved her hand in, patting, scratching, searching-

Empty. The drawer was _empty._

She had only put the diary in there this morning. Had Dobby come back and-

"Lyra… Was the diary black?"

She slammed the drawer shut, and looked over to Draco, only to find his gaze locked on her bed behind them.

She followed the trail of eye, and froze.

The Diary was back on her pillow.

_Open._

"Do you think the House Elves moved it?"

Draco didn't seem convinced of her question masquerading as an assertion, in truth, neither was she, but he shrugged, unsure, and step by step, the twins edged closer, slow, cautious, scared but ensnared.

A foot away from the bed, and subsequently the vanishing diary, Draco reached out and snatched her hand, lacing his fingers through her own.

Lyra squeezed back.

Finally close enough to touch it, Lyra took a steadying breath and did just that.

"Someone's wrote it in."

Draco lent in close to her shoulder, to peer down at the pages of the diary.

Neat, crisp handwriting danced across the parchment.

**_Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them By Newt Scamander._ **

**_Chapter Seven, Letter B is where you will find your answer._ **

**_Protect yourself and your home, Lyra, and you will protect those you care for._ **

**_P.S Speckled Chicken eggs work best._ **

Lyra scoffed and tore her hand out from Draco's, marching to her window, Draco hot on her tail, heaving the heavy glass pane open, and, promptly, she threw the book right out like a Frisbee.

It went soaring down on the gust of Draco's indignant yelps.

"Have you gone _mad_?"

Lyra flung the window shut with a resolute bang.

"It's obviously one of those gag gifts. Fred and George make things like that all the time. Tissue that stays stuck to your boot. jumpers that turn themselves inside out when you wear them. I have no time to-"

Whatever she was going to say died a swift death as the twins turned from the window, and there it was.

The diary.

Open on the floor before them.

Not a page out of place.

New writing across its curved face.

_**Don't do that again, Lyra. It's incredibly rude, and a little nauseating.** _

Lyra's hummed.

"Perhaps not a gag gift then."

Draco cocked a high arching brow.

"You don't bloody well say."

The twins had quickly retreated from Lyra's room after haphazardly throwing the diary back into her draw and running from the cupboard.

It was neither of their proudest moments, but it seemed to get the job done.

The diary had not followed them to Draco's room, a pigsty of Quidditch memorabilia and wrinkled sheets and something that smelled like _boy._

"Maybe we should tell Lucius and Narcissa about the book now."

Pacing the short stretch of flooring that wasn't covered in clothes or toys, Draco shook his head as Lyra perched on the edge of his bed, every now and again glancing to his pillow just to make sure the diary wasn't there.

"We _can't_ do that. Father will take the book away, and we'll never see it again. Worse, mother will lock us up in this house and won't let us see sunlight until we're sixty. I'm too young and handsome for solitary confinement, Lyra."

Draco swivelled to face her head on.

"You said it yourself. Dobby said this _Bad man_ knows when his name is spoken, that he has eyes everywhere. The more mother and father know, the more danger they're in."

Lyra sagged, slipping from the bed to rest on the floor, dragging her knees up tight to her chest.

"Then, by your own logic, _you're_ in danger. _I_ put you in danger by telling you about the diary and that memory. I'm horrible at this whole family thing."

Her forehead thunked against her kneecaps.

She was making a right mess of things, wasn't she?

She finally had something good going, and now she had ruined it with a bloody book.

Hermione was wrong. Libraries brought nothing but trouble.

Lyra didn't see Draco sit beside her, but she heard the steps of his sock clad feet, felt the heat bloom from her left side, and felt the gentle hand upon her back, steadying her.

"Ah, but I have something on my side that this bad man doesn't. _Lyra Malfoy_. Look at what you did last year, became the youngest Seeker in a century, defeated a mountain troll, solved the hardest riddles the Hogwart's Professors could conjure, and bashed in Quirrell. And that was all with someone like Ronald Weasley at your back. Imagine what we could do together?"

Lyra stood in a blink, shirking off the hand at her back.

"This isn't a game, Draco! This isn't some great adventure! People can get hurt! _You_ can get hurt… I don't want to hurt anyone."

Draco met her fire with his own.

"I'm not going to get hurt, and neither is mother or father. Look, if the book was malicious, it would have struck last night while we we're all sleeping and vulnerable in one easy to kill pile. I just don't think it wants to… Hurt us. I think it wants to _help_. I say we let it, and worse comes to worse, we tell mother and father we have a very strange book in your drawer, and then they can get rid of it. No harm, no foul."

Lyra went to argue, to list all the reasons why this was such a terrible idea, when Draco, suddenly, yanked himself away from her, dark and gloomy and-

_Hurt._

"I don't know about muggles, but in _our_ world, being twins is something _special_. My magic is _your_ magic, and your magic is _my_ magic and… And I just want to do something with my sister for once. You were always running off with Weasley and that Granger girl, and the only way you would ever talk to me was when you were yelling or accusing me of being a ferret."

He refused to meet her gaze.

"I just wanted something for _us_ , something we could share, a secret all our own that we could make private jokes about like you have with Granger and Weasley."

She had never heard Draco be so achingly honest before.

Perhaps she had not dared to listen close enough to, head filled with all the things Ron said about the Malfoys, about Draco, and that was on _her,_ not him.

And twins were special, weren't they? Lyra had seen it for herself with Fred and George. An ebb and flow and twirl about that didn't really need words all that much.

She and Draco could have that too, she knew, could feel it deep in her bones, as she knew that memory from earlier was just that, a memory and not a dream.

She couldn't do this alone.

And what trouble could a chicken's egg truly cause?

Finally, Lyra nodded.

"Fine… _Fine,_ but if something goes wrong, if that book so much as gives us a paper cut, I'm telling Narcissa everything, and I'm blaming you for it all of it."

Draco brightened, sunlight peeking out between thunder clouds, and, anew, he was off, weaving for his desk, snatching at parchment and raven quill from the lopsided heap.

"What are you doing?"

Draco carried on scribbling.

"I'm writing to my friend, Nott, the one who sent you chocolates. He'll have a copy of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, a first uncensored edition if we're lucky, and he'll be going to Diagon Alley Monday for school supplies. We can get our hands on it then without mother or father figuring out we're up to something."

Lyra frowned.

"Don't you have a copy of it in that huge library down stairs? And what do you mean, _uncensored_? Why would a book about animals need to be censored?"

Draco dashed his quill down and blew on his parchment to dry the ink.

"The first edition wasn't ran through the publisher properly. Newt Scamander had a few nasty beasts in there, beasts the school board thought _unsavoury_ for children and the public at large to learn about, and so it was taken down from the shelves and republished. But not before a few copies were sold. One such copy Nott keeps bragging that he has at home."

Draco pulled away from his letter, proudly smiling at his work.

"Monday, then?"

Lyra nodded.

"Monday."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the change in formatting, and any grammar/spelling mistakes you may find in this chapter. I've recently gotten a new laptop, and I'm still working on figuring it all out.


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